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Disaster Recovery Plan
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CloudCard
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In the event of a disaster, companies must act quickly and decisively. The goal of this document is to establish a trusted plan in preparation for any future disasters. This plan will act as a guide for CloudCard to follow. CloudCard utilizes Amazon Web Services to store all of its data. This strategic move allows CloudCard to quickly launch resources in Amazon Web Services (AWS) to ensure business continuity. This plan highlights the usage of AWS services and features that CloudCard plans to leverage if disaster strikes, significantly minimizing the impact on data, system, and overall business operations. Though AWS supports multiple strategies, CloudCard has chosen a “Pilot Lite” strategy in order to mitigate the risk of data loss in the event of a disaster.
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PLAN OBJECTIVES
PLAN SCOPE
SERVICE RPO AND RTO TARGETS
BACKUP STRATEGY
AWS PILOT LITE PLAN & STRATEGY
PLAN REVIEW
REVISION HISTORY
ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
EXTERNAL CONTACTS
INCIDENT RESPONSE
DR PROCEDURES
APPENDICES
This document details the policies and procedures of Cloud Card LLC in the event of a disruption to critical IT services or damage to IT equipment or data. These processes will ensure that those assets are recoverable to the right level and within the right timeframe to deliver a return to normal operations, with minimal impact on the business.
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To quickly respond in the event of a natural disaster
To effectively respond in the event of a natural disaster
To mitigate/prevent data loss in the event of a natural disaster
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Amazon Web Services
AWS data centers
AWS data storage
Amazon S3
Amazon Route 53
Amazon Machine Images
Amazon Elastic Beanstalk
Amazon Elastic Load Balancing
DNS records
Shentel
Cricket Wireless
Primary business operations
Primary business headquarters
Assignment of roles for disaster response personnel
Plans and procedures
Critical tasks checklist
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The term pilot light refers to a DR scenario in which a minimal version of an environment is always running in the cloud. With AWS, CloudCard maintains a pilot light by configuring and running the most critical, core elements of its system. When the time comes for recovery, we will rapidly provision a full-scale production environment around the critical core.
Infrastructure elements for the pilot light itself include our Amazon RDS database servers, which are replicated to a different availability zone using a multi-AZ deployment as well as our Amazon S3 files, which are stored redundantly across multiple availability zones (data centers) to preserve data. This is the critical core of the system (the pilot light) around which all other infrastructure pieces in AWS can quickly be provisioned to restore the complete system.
To provision the remainder of the infrastructure to restore business-critical services, CloudCard will provision new Elastic Beanstalk environments in the new availability zone using standard Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), which are ready to be started up at a moment’s notice. When starting recovery, instances from these AMIs come up quickly with their predefined role (for example, Web or App Server) within the deployment around the pilot light. From a networking point of view, Elastic Beanstalk automatically configures Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) to distribute traffic to multiple app servers. We will then update our Route 53 DNS records to point at our our load balancers.
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● The DR plan itself will be formally reviewed once every 12 months and in response to a regular test
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IT service
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Scenario
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RPO
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RTO
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Priority
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AWS
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Amazon data center failure or destruction
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<2 hours
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<24 hours
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Highest
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IT service
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Backup location
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Backup frequency
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AWS Pilot Lite
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Separate AWS data center
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Continually
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Version
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Date
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Revision details
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The following individuals are to assume responsibility for restoring IT services when the DR plan is activated:
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Name
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Job role
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Contact details
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DR process owned
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Anthony Erskine
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Product Owner and IT lead
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Phone: (434) 248-0444
Email:
tony@onlinephotosubmission.com
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Completion of the Pilot Lite plan
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Luke Rettstatt
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Managing Director
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Phone:
(434) 253-5657
luke@onlinephotosubmission.com
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Primary point of contact for all customer questions.
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Name
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Organization
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Contact details
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DR process owned
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Todd Brooks
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Color ID
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Phone:
(704) 897-1959
Email:
Todd.Brooks@ColorID.com
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Communicating DR process to current customer base.
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Zack Walker
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Vision Database Systems
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Phone:
(561) 386-1534
Email: zack.walker@visiondatabase.com
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Communicating DR process to current customer base.
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The DR plan is to be activated when one or more of the following criteria are met:
● The Amazon data center in which CloudCard stores its data is destroyed or is in imminent danger of being destroyed.
The person discovering the incident must notify the following DR stakeholders, who collectively assume responsibility for deciding which - if any - aspects of the DR plan should be implemented, and for establishing communication with employees, management, partners and customers.
● First point of contact - Anthony Erskine (contact details listed above)
● Second point of contact - Luke Rettstatt (contact details listed above)
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In the event of severe damage to the AWS data center in which CloudCard stores its data, the following plan will be executed.
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Plan of action (Critical tasks checklist)
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Identify issue, coordinate initial response (Luke Rettstat
Contact Amazon to gauge the extent of damage (Luke Rettstatt)
Evaluate damage
Communicate with Anthony Erskine to initiate the Pilot Light Plan
Contact External Organizations to make them aware of the situation (Luke Rettstatt)
Establish data recovery targets and timeframes (Anthony Erskine)
Share targets and timeframes with customers and external organization
Improve upon the process in case of a future disaster (Anthony Erskine) (Luke Rettstatt)
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Key contacts
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Anthony Erskine / Product Owner & Lead IT specialist
Phone: (434) 248-0444
Email: tony@onlinephotosubmission.com
Luke Rettstatt / Managing Director
Phone: (434) 253-5657
Email: luke@onlinephotosubmission.com
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The appendices to your DR plan may include the following:
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Address
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Contact
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915 11th Street
Lynchburg, VA 24504
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Luke Rettstatt
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1103 Wise Street
Lynchburg, VA 24504
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This document has been moved - see here for the latest version:Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan