Multi-Cloud, Multi-Vendor Business Continuity Planning On AWS

A major cryptocurrency trading platform company that included financial transactions was experiencing repeated outages and data-loss. Through analysis and discovery, Better Than Services determined that a standard Disaster Recovery solution would not provide sufficient RPO and RTO. What was required was a multi-live site hot-hot solution. Each environment had to be functional as a standalone and handle 100% of their user traffic in the event of a failover of the other environment. Failover and failback had to deliver no downtime to avoid replayed or lost transactions. The client already had a significant hardware footprint that was a less than a year old, so they didn't wish to walk away from that investment. The determination was made that the second live site would be built on AWS and then integrated with the on-premise environment. In this high-compliance environment, the KYC/AML (Know Your Customer/Anti-Money Laundering) environment was served up by a third party vendor in a separate AWS region. This needed to be integrated with the client's main cloud & on-premise environments.

 

BTS deployed multiple application landscapes, each fully functional as a standalone solution containing RDS, FSx, multiple EC2 instances, and network integration through VPC peering and Amazon DirectConnect. The network solutions put in place spanned multiple regions and multiple organizations, and infrastructure providers. BTS integrated the cloud landscape with the client's on-prem datacenter using an Amazon Direct Connect circuit with an IPSec VPN over an additional multi-link internet connection. Utilizing dynamic routing through BGP in order to provide load balancing and redundancy between multiple circuits of different formats and connection speeds, BTS was able to deliver 99.999% reliability.

Utilizing the now global network landscape spanning both the cloud and physical datacenters, BTS architects were able to deploy a fully redundant multi-region RDS deployment including bi-directional replication between on-prem and the cloud.

Better Than Services leveraged FSx to build a full data storage solution, allowing the client to store artifacts that contain PII, which is required by KYC/AML legislation (Know Your Customer/Anti-Money Laundering) in a secure, reliable, and cost-effective manner on AWS. 

Through leveraging Better Than Services consulting services, the client was able to consolidate their interface with disparate vendors. This allowed the them to have a single touchpoint across multiple vendors to seamlessly integrate their on-premise environment with their AWS footprint and third-party cloud deployments.

Resiliency: By deploying disaster recovery in AWS, the client was able to increase their customer-facing uptime significantly, which also positively impacted revenue.

Agility: The Client gained the ability to schedule platform downtime and failover to the environment.

Security compliance: By leveraging FSx and AWS security best practices, PII data was now fully secured achieving both security and cost optimization.

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) | Amazon EC2 | AWS Direct Connect | AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) | Amazon FSx | Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)