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Using the Cloud Orbit platform to implement disaster recovery (DR) automation

The Cloud Orbit platform can be leveraged to automate application development, deployment, runtime operations, and routine IT infrastructure tasks across primary environments and disaster recovery sites, ensuring they remain consistently in sync, preventing data loss, and promoting business continuity.
The Cloud Orbit platform can be leveraged to automate application development, deployment, runtime operations, and routine IT infrastructure tasks across primary environments and disaster recovery sites, ensuring they remain consistently in sync, preventing data loss, and promoting business continuity.

Problem statement

Today’s competitive market landscape puts software developers in a precarious situation. The pressure to quickly deliver new features coincides with the requirement to uphold rigorous data protection and system security standards and maintain 24/7 availability of critical applications and business functions.

To reconcile these contradictions, the DevOps methodology promotes extensive internal and external communication and collaboration across the entire IT value chain (from business development through operations to infrastructure).

However, regardless of how many software development teams have already embraced DevOps practices, many IT infrastructure teams across businesses and industries continue to operate in a “plan-build-run” model, segmented by siloed components such as network, storage, and computing.

Critical challenges to efficient disaster recovery

Disaster recovery planning, crisis management, and recovery process execution remain significant issues for many businesses. Establishing an effective disaster recovery plan becomes particularly challenging in large organizations still depending on legacy critical systems and manual procedures, which often result in DR sites being out of sync with production applications.

Typically, a business continuity planning (BCP) team is tasked with developing a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy across multiple business units and applications. Frequently, the BCP team cooperates with various departments and teams for weeks just to create a disaster recovery plan containing 50+ necessary steps for every production application and submit them for further testing.

Due to the manual nature of these procedures, conducting a successful disaster recovery process takes hours, making it difficult to find a suitable window for such exercises. Today, every business needs to minimize downtime, or the organization risks customer dissatisfaction. However, constant rescheduling of test exercises leads to eroded confidence in the viability of disaster recovery solutions in place.

Moreover, even after successfully completing a disaster recovery exercise, common issues include:

  • An out-of-sync disaster recovery site: This occurs when the infrastructure or application configurations of a primary data center and a secondary location (or locations) do not match.
  • An outdated disaster recovery plan: Adding new software features, deploying new security patches, and making other changes in software render such DR plans outdated and consequently require regular disaster recovery testing and frequent procedure updates.

Consequently, when an actual disaster strikes, software teams may attempt to fix issues on the primary site rather than follow disaster recovery procedures and restore data from uncertain backup systems.

Our approach and disaster recovery solution

Maxima Consulting’s Cloud Orbit contains thoroughly tested disaster recovery tools that streamline DR into a repeatable, automated process.

The platform’s DR Drift module is a metadata-driven alerting system that tracks production and DR sites and notifies the disaster recovery team about any out-of-sync situations.

As a result, Cloud Orbit can be used to simplify disaster recovery by enhancing business application resilience for both on-premise and cloud infrastructure deployments.

Key features of Cloud Orbit disaster recovery solutions include:

  • Deployment automation: Automate both legacy and cloud-native application deployment across multiple types of cloud services.
  • Disaster recovery automation: Leverage replication status-aware probes to ensure the DR site’s consistency.
  • Application and infrastructure drift management: Utilize automation to continuously monitor and easily manage drift between the primary environment and DR sites.

With these features, the Cloud Orbit platform empowers businesses to have confidence in their disaster recovery solutions and optimize cloud utilization without compromising compliance requirements or damaging recovery time objectives.

Components of disaster recovery planning with Cloud Orbit

Disaster recovery automation affects multiple tiers of infrastructure and applications, often varying widely in interfaces and underlying technologies. To manage this complexity, Cloud Orbit’s DR Automation module encompasses many components. Some of the most important are listed below.

  1. Metadata-driven Ansible-based automation: Managed from the Cloud Orbit Control Plane, this efficient element consists of several tasks to be executed in sequence with multiple validations and detailed execution logs.
  2. Disaster recovery verification: Enables continuous monitoring and final verification of sites before starting a disaster recovery exercise.
  3. Stopping integration services: This component temporarily suspends interfaces like MQ/Kafka, FTP, and autosys jobs to prevent processing errors.
  4. Primary site shutdown: Enables quick suspension of web, middle-tier, and database services at the primary site.
  5. DR site activation: Responsible for verifying the data backup and bringing up the disaster recovery database, reversing replication, and restarting web and middle-tier services.
  6. DNS changes: Allows for making DNS changes to quickly replace the primary site with a DR site.

Client’s essential benefits

By automating and simplifying its disaster recovery strategies with Cloud Orbit, an organization obtains many significant benefits, including:

  • Rapid recovery: Automation significantly reduces the time required to successfully execute a disaster recovery plan and return to normal operations.
  • Enhanced systems resilience: Continuous synchronization between primary and DR sites ensures quick recovery and minimizes the chance of data loss in the event of an actual disaster.
  • Improved confidence: Automation systems and consistent verification of critical data contribute to restoring faith in the organization’s disaster recovery strategy.

Business impact analysis: A healthcare provider

A US-based healthcare provider utilized Maxima Consulting’s services to ensure high availability for its web-based member portal and adopt a cloud-native CI/CD pipeline with comprehensive audit and logging capabilities. The ability to swiftly recover data in the event of a disaster was paramount for the client’s business-critical applications.

Project highlights

  • Our reusable, curated, and standardized Cloud Orbit stacks and customizations tailored to client’s needs were utilized to facilitate migrating legacy applications and enable rapid deployment capabilities.
  • Kubernetes cluster deployment solution was built with a Master Node and 4 worker nodes split between DMZ and private VLANs.
  • By logically dividing clusters into DEV, UAT, and PROD regions (with a 50% resource quota designated for PROD), we enabled a smooth work environment for the software development team.
  • Implementing a comprehensive GitOps model allowed continued automation and control enhancements.
  • The solution enabled us to ensure high availability by achieving multiple zero-downtime upgrades.
  • Automated data backup ensures the Kubernetes cluster can be brought up at the DR site within the required RPO (recovery point objective) and RTO (recovery time objective).

Contact us today for a tailored disaster recovery strategy

By automating data backup and disaster recovery processes, enhancing deployment automation, and enabling a genuine and thorough GitOps model, the Cloud Orbit platform provides a robust framework for organizations to build resilient, secure, and scalable IT infrastructures.

Contact us today and schedule a free consultation. Our digital strategy expert will evaluate your particular business requirements to provide an efficient solution tailored to your organization.

Frequently asked questions

What is disaster recovery?

Disaster recovery is a process of restoring an organization’s access to critical systems, data, and IT functionalities after some kind of harmful event that resulted in a system failure.

An event of a disaster could be, for example, a cyber attack, hardware failure, network outage, or a natural disaster resulting in power outages. It can be caused by a malicious act, human error, natural cause, or other security risks.

Should your company have a disaster recovery plan?

Yes, all companies should include a disaster recovery (DR) solution in their broader risk management strategies. Different disaster scenarios, including ransomware attacks, natural disasters, and equipment failure, can happen at any time and significantly impact your business operations.