Cloud Based IT DR

Who

A US based educational service provider specializing in integrating technology into university classrooms across the US. Their cloud based solutions have revolutionized the way instructors and students interact with each other.

Challenge

• The organization provides services to its customers through servers hosted on the AWS data centers designated as “US East”. Though there are firewalls and other vulnerability management mechanisms installed on the organization’s production servers, a risk of production environment failure through cyber attacks was still a possibility. If there occurred a down time in the production servers due to a malicious cyber activity, there were no fail over servers to which customer traffic could be routed.
• The production environment was accessible to all of the organization’s IT personnel. There was a need to restrict access based on employees’ roles and responsibilities.

Solution

• SIB with its expert panel of IT DR consultants came up with a fail over strategy which included mirroring the organization’s production servers onto a different AWS availability zone designated as “US West”. This availability zone would be the organization’s dedicated IT DR site which would handle customer traffic in the event production servers fail.
• The DR environment was configured in such a way that it would only boot up if the production servers were inaccessible thus benefiting the organization on the cost front.
• The recovery procedures to be carried out to boot up the DR site were documented in the organization’s IT DR plan and loaded into the SIB software.
• All personnel responsible to execute these procedures were also identified and documented in the SIB platform.
• In addition to configuring the IT DR site, SIB consultants also configured access management for the organization’s IT personnel. This was done using Amazon’s Identity Access Management and two factor authentication APIs.
• The SIB team also helped the organization conduct table top exercises by shutting down the production environment and ensuring personnel have the relevant know how to transfer data processing to the DR site.