Abstract

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.

Contents

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.

Plan objectives

• 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

Plan scope

• 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

AWS Pilot Light Plan & Strategy

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.

Plan review

● The DR plan itself will be formally reviewed once every 12 months and in response to a regular test

Service RPO and RTO targets

Backup strategy

Revision history

Roles and responsibilities

The following individuals are to assume responsibility for restoring IT services when the DR plan is activated:

Internal contacts

External contacts

Incident response

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)

DR procedures

In the event of severe damage to the AWS data center in which CloudCard stores its data, the following plan will be executed.

Appendices

The appendices to your DR plan may include the following:

Alternate work locations