Disaster Recovery Plan

CloudSync Enterprise Platform

Document Version: 2.1
Last Updated: August 25, 2025
Document Owner: Infrastructure & Security Team
Classification: Internal – Restricted

---

Executive Summary

This Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP) establishes comprehensive procedures for recovering the CloudSync Enterprise Platform following a catastrophic event. The plan ensures business continuity with a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 4 hours and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 15 minutes for critical systems.

Critical Recovery Metrics

• Maximum Tolerable Downtime: 8 hours
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO): 4 hours
• Recovery Point Objective (RPO): 15 minutes
• Annual Availability Target: 99.95%

---

1. System Architecture Overview

1.1 Production Environment

The CloudSync platform operates across a multi-tier architecture:

Primary Data Center (US-East-1)

• Application Tier: 12 EC2 instances (c5.4xlarge)
• Database Tier: RDS PostgreSQL Multi-AZ cluster
• Cache Layer: ElastiCache Redis cluster (3 nodes)
• Storage: S3 buckets with cross-region replication
• CDN: CloudFront distributions

Secondary Data Center (US-West-2)

• Hot standby environment with 50% capacity
• Real-time database replication
• Automated failover capabilities

1.2 Critical System Dependencies

• External APIs: Stripe Payment Gateway, SendGrid Email Service
• DNS: Route 53 with health checks and failover routing
• Monitoring: DataDog, PagerDuty alerting
• Security: AWS WAF, Security Groups, IAM roles

---

2. Risk Assessment & Threat Analysis

2.1 Threat Categories

Risk Category	Probability	Impact	Mitigation Priority
Hardware Failure	High	Medium	P1
Data Center Outage	Medium	High	P1
Cyber Attack	Medium	High	P1
Human Error	High	Medium	P2
Natural Disaster	Low	High	P2
Network Failure	Medium	Medium	P3

2.2 Business Impact Analysis

• Revenue Impact: $50,000 per hour of downtime
• Customer Impact: 15,000 active users affected
• Regulatory Compliance: SOX, GDPR data protection requirements
• SLA Obligations: 99.9% uptime guarantee with financial penalties

---

3. Recovery Procedures

3.1 Incident Classification

Level 1 – Minor Impact

• Single component failure
• No customer-facing impact
• Auto-recovery expected

Level 2 – Moderate Impact

• Partial service degradation
• Some customer impact
• Manual intervention required

Level 3 – Major Impact

• Complete service outage
• All customers affected
• Full disaster recovery activation

3.2 Emergency Response Team

Incident Commander: CTO or designated Infrastructure Lead Database Recovery Team: Senior Database Engineers (2) Application Recovery Team: Lead Developers (3) Network Team: Network Operations Engineers (2) Communications Lead: Customer Success Manager

3.3 Recovery Activation Procedures

Phase 1: Assessment & Notification (0-15 minutes)

1. Incident Detection
2. # Automated monitoring alerts via PagerDuty
3. # Manual verification of system status
4. aws cloudwatch get-metric-statistics \
5.   –namespace AWS/ApplicationELB \
6.   –metric-name TargetResponseTime \
7.   –start-time 2025-08-25T10:00:00Z \
8.   –end-time 2025-08-25T11:00:00Z \
9.   –period 300 –statistics Average
10. Incident Classification
    1. Assess scope and severity using monitoring dashboards
    1. Determine if disaster recovery activation is required
    1. Document initial findings in incident management system
11. Team Notification
12. # PagerDuty escalation policy
13. escalation_rules:
14.   – level: 1
15.     delay: 0
16.     targets: [on_call_engineer]
17.   – level: 2
18.     delay: 15_minutes
19.     targets: [incident_commander, db_team]
20.   – level: 3
21.     delay: 30_minutes
22.     targets: [executive_team]

Phase 2: Immediate Response (15-60 minutes)

1. Failover to Secondary Region
2. # Update Route 53 health checks to redirect traffic
3. aws route53 change-resource-record-sets \
4.   –hosted-zone-id Z123456789 \
5.   –change-batch file://failover-changeset.json
6.  
7. # Scale up secondary environment
8. aws autoscaling update-auto-scaling-group \
9.   –auto-scaling-group-name cloudsync-secondary-asg \
10.   –desired-capacity 12
11. Database Failover
12. — Verify replication lag before failover
13. SELECT EXTRACT(EPOCH FROM (now() – pg_last_xact_replay_timestamp())) AS lag_seconds;
14.  
15. — Promote read replica to primary
16. aws rds promote-read-replica \
17.   –db-instance-identifier cloudsync-replica-west
18. Application Configuration
19. # Update application configuration for new environment
20. kubectl set env deployment/cloudsync-api \
21.   DATABASE_HOST=cloudsync-west.cluster-xxx.us-west-2.rds.amazonaws.com \
22.   REDIS_HOST=cloudsync-west.cache.amazonaws.com
23.  
24. # Restart application pods
25. kubectl rollout restart deployment/cloudsync-api

Phase 3: System Restoration (1-4 hours)

1. Data Integrity Verification
2. # Data consistency check script
3. import psycopg2
4. from datetime import datetime, timedelta
5.  
6. def verify_data_integrity():
7.     conn = psycopg2.connect(DATABASE_URL)
8.     cursor = conn.cursor()
9.     
10.     # Check for data gaps in critical tables
11.     cursor.execute(“””
12.         SELECT COUNT(*) as missing_records
13.         FROM generate_series(%s, %s, interval ‘1 minute’) t
14.         LEFT JOIN user_activities ua ON date_trunc(‘minute’, ua.created_at) = t
15.         WHERE ua.id IS NULL
16.     “””, [recovery_start_time, current_time])
17.     
18.     return cursor.fetchone()[0]
19. Performance Monitoring
    1. Monitor response times and error rates
    1. Verify all microservices are operational
    1. Check external API connectivity
20. Customer Communication
21. # Status Page Update Template
22. **RESOLVED** – Service Restoration Complete
23.  
24. We have successfully restored all services following the infrastructure incident.
25. All systems are now operating normally.
26.  
27. Timeline:
28. – 10:15 AM PST: Issue detected
29. – 10:30 AM PST: Failover initiated 
30. – 11:45 AM PST: Full service restored
31.  
32. We sincerely apologize for the disruption.

---

4. Data Backup & Recovery

4.1 Backup Strategy

Database Backups

• Automated daily snapshots with 30-day retention
• Point-in-time recovery capability
• Cross-region backup replication
• Weekly restore testing

# Automated backup script

#!/bin/bash

TIMESTAMP=$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S)

BACKUP_NAME=”cloudsync-backup-${TIMESTAMP}”

aws rds create-db-snapshot \

  –db-instance-identifier cloudsync-production \

  –db-snapshot-identifier ${BACKUP_NAME}

# Copy snapshot to secondary region

aws rds copy-db-snapshot \

  –source-db-snapshot-identifier ${BACKUP_NAME} \

  –target-db-snapshot-identifier ${BACKUP_NAME} \

  –source-region us-east-1 \

  –target-region us-west-2

Application Data Backups

• S3 versioning enabled with lifecycle policies
• Cross-region replication to secondary bucket
• File integrity monitoring with checksums

4.2 Recovery Procedures

Database Point-in-Time Recovery

# Restore database to specific point in time

aws rds restore-db-instance-to-point-in-time \

  –source-db-instance-identifier cloudsync-production \

  –target-db-instance-identifier cloudsync-recovery-temp \

  –restore-time 2025-08-25T09:45:00.000Z

Application Data Recovery

# Restore files from S3 backup

aws s3 sync s3://cloudsync-backup-bucket/2025-08-25/ \

  s3://cloudsync-production-bucket/ \

  –delete –exact-timestamps

---

5. Communication Plan

5.1 Internal Communications

Immediate Notification (0-15 minutes)

• Incident Commander notifies executive team
• Technical teams activated via PagerDuty
• War room established (Slack #incident-response)

Status Updates (Every 30 minutes)

• Progress updates to stakeholders
• ETA adjustments based on recovery progress
• Documentation of actions taken

5.2 External Communications

Customer Notifications

1. Status page update within 15 minutes of detection
2. Email notification to affected customers
3. Social media updates for widespread issues
4. Post-incident report within 48 hours

Template Communications

<!– Status Page Banner –>

<div class=”status-alert warning”>

  <strong>Service Degradation:</strong> We are currently experiencing

  issues with our platform. Our team is actively working on a resolution.

  Updates will be posted here.

</div>

---

6. Testing & Validation

6.1 Disaster Recovery Testing Schedule

Monthly Tests

• Backup restoration verification
• Failover mechanism testing
• Network connectivity validation

Quarterly Tests

• Full disaster recovery simulation
• Cross-team coordination exercises
• Recovery time measurement

Annual Tests

• Complete infrastructure rebuild
• Business continuity validation
• Third-party vendor coordination

6.2 Test Procedures

Failover Test Checklist

pre_test_checklist:

  – [ ] Backup current configuration

  – [ ] Notify stakeholders of planned test

  – [ ] Verify monitoring systems operational

  – [ ] Confirm rollback procedures

test_execution:

  – [ ] Initiate planned failover

  – [ ] Measure failover time

  – [ ] Verify application functionality

  – [ ] Test data consistency

  – [ ] Validate monitoring alerts

post_test_validation:

  – [ ] Document lessons learned

  – [ ] Update procedures if needed

  – [ ] Schedule remediation tasks

  – [ ] Report results to management

---

7. Monitoring & Alerting

7.1 Health Check Monitoring

Application Monitoring

# Health check endpoint implementation

@app.route(‘/health’)

def health_check():

    checks = {

        ‘database’: check_database_connection(),

        ‘redis’: check_redis_connection(),

        ‘external_apis’: check_external_dependencies(),

        ‘disk_space’: check_disk_usage()

    }

    overall_status = ‘healthy’ if all(checks.values()) else ‘unhealthy’

    return jsonify({‘status’: overall_status, ‘checks’: checks})

Infrastructure Monitoring

• CPU utilization > 80% for 5 minutes
• Memory usage > 85% for 5 minutes
• Disk space > 90% usage
• Network latency > 100ms
• Database connection pool exhaustion

7.2 Alert Escalation Matrix

Alert Severity	Response Time	Escalation
Critical	5 minutes	Immediate page to on-call
High	15 minutes	Email + Slack notification
Medium	1 hour	Slack notification
Low	4 hours	Daily summary email

---

8. Recovery Validation

8.1 System Verification Checklist

Post-Recovery Validation

• [ ] All application services responding
• [ ] Database queries executing normally
• [ ] User authentication functioning
• [ ] Payment processing operational
• [ ] Email notifications sending
• [ ] File uploads/downloads working
• [ ] API endpoints responding within SLA
• [ ] Monitoring systems operational

8.2 Performance Baselines

# Automated performance validation script

#!/bin/bash

# API Response Time Check

response_time=$(curl -w “%{time_total}” -s -o /dev/null https://api.cloudsync.com/health)

if (( $(echo “$response_time > 2.0” | bc -l) )); then

    echo “WARNING: API response time ${response_time}s exceeds threshold”

fi

# Database Performance Check

db_queries_per_second=$(psql -t -c “SELECT sum(calls)/300 FROM pg_stat_statements WHERE query ~ ‘SELECT'”)

echo “Database QPS: $db_queries_per_second”

# Memory Usage Check 

memory_usage=$(free | awk ‘NR==2{printf “%.2f%%”, $3*100/$2}’)

echo “Memory usage: $memory_usage”

---

9. Post-Incident Procedures

9.1 Post-Mortem Process

Timeline Documentation

1. Create detailed incident timeline
2. Identify root cause analysis
3. Document what worked well
4. Identify improvement opportunities

Post-Mortem Meeting

• Schedule within 48 hours of resolution
• Include all team members involved
• Review timeline and decisions made
• Assign action items for improvements

9.2 Improvement Implementation

Action Item Tracking

## Post-Incident Action Items

### High Priority

– [ ] Update monitoring thresholds based on incident

– [ ] Improve failover automation scripts

– [ ] Add additional health checks

### Medium Priority 

– [ ] Review and update documentation

– [ ] Enhance team training procedures

– [ ] Evaluate additional backup strategies

### Low Priority

– [ ] Optimize recovery scripts

– [ ] Update communication templates

– [ ] Review vendor SLAs

---

10. Appendices

Appendix A: Emergency Contacts

Role	Primary	Secondary	Phone	Email
Incident Commander	John Smith	Sarah Wilson	+1-555-0101	john.smith@company.com
Database Lead	Mike Chen	Lisa Park	+1-555-0102	mike.chen@company.com
Network Engineer	Alex Johnson	Tom Brown	+1-555-0103	alex.johnson@company.com
Security Lead	Emma Davis	Chris Lee	+1-555-0104	emma.davis@company.com

Appendix B: Vendor Contacts

AWS Support: Enterprise Support, Case Priority: High
Phone: 1-800-xxx-xxxx | Portal: https://console.aws.amazon.com/support/

DataDog Support: Premium Plan
Phone: 1-866-xxx-xxxx | Email: support@datadoghq.com

Appendix C: Recovery Scripts Repository

All disaster recovery scripts are maintained in the infrastructure repository:

https://github.com/company/infrastructure-dr

├── failover/

│   ├── database-failover.sh

│   ├── application-failover.sh

│   └── dns-update.sh

├── monitoring/ 

│   ├── health-checks.py

│   └── performance-validation.sh

└── communication/

    ├── status-page-updates.md

    └── notification-templates.json

Appendix D: Compliance Requirements

SOX Compliance

• Maintain audit trail of all recovery actions
• Document access controls during incident
• Preserve financial data integrity

GDPR Compliance

• Notify data protection officer within 1 hour
• Assess potential data breach implications
• Prepare regulatory notification if required

---

Document Control

Review Schedule: Quarterly
Next Review Date: November 25, 2025
Approved By: Chief Technology Officer
Distribution: Infrastructure Team, Executive Team, Compliance Team

Change Log:

Version	Date	Changes	Author
2.1	2025-08-25	Updated RTO/RPO targets, added automation scripts	Infrastructure Team
2.0	2025-05-15	Major revision – new architecture, updated procedures	J. Smith
1.5	2025-02-01	Added compliance requirements, vendor contacts	E. Davis

---

This document contains confidential and proprietary information. Distribution is restricted to authorized personnel only.