Over the years, Pentagon's managed services team has responded to one recurring scenario: an organization invokes their disaster recovery plan for the first time during an actual disaster - and discovers it does not work the way they thought it would. DR is not a document. It is an architecture you build, test, and continuously validate.
At Pentagon System & Services Pvt. Ltd., Disaster Recovery planning and implementation is a core pillar of our AWS Managed Services offering. We work with organizations across Banking & Financial Services, Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals, Manufacturing, and Enterprise Technology – industries where downtime is not just an inconvenience, it is a compliance failure and a direct threat to business continuity.
The question Pentagon asks every new customer is not ‘do you have a DR plan?’ Most do. The question is: when did you last test it, and what was the measured RTO?
At Pentagon System & Services Pvt. Ltd., we work with organizations across BFSI, Healthcare, Manufacturing, and Enterprise Technology who ask us the same question: are we managing our AWS environment, or is it managing us?
RPO and RTO – The Two Numbers That Define Your Business Risk:
Every DR architecture Pentagon design begins with a precise understanding of two metrics that translate directly into infrastructure investment and risk tolerance:
RPO – Recovery Point Objective:
How much data can your business afford to lose? Measured in time. If your RPO is 1 hour, Pentagon must architect systems that can restore to a state no older than 1 hour before failure. An RPO of 24 hours means potentially losing an entire day of transactions.
RTO – Recovery Time Objective:
How long can your operations remain down? Measured in time. If your RTO is 4 hours, Pentagon must architect a recovery path that restores full operations within 4 hours of a disaster declaration. For a payment gateway, even 30 minutes may exceed what the business can absorb.
Pentagon aligns every DR architecture we design and manage to customer-defined RPO and RTO targets – and then we validate those targets through actual DR drills, not assumptions.
The Four DR Strategies Pentagon Implements on AWS
Pentagon’s DR practice covers all four AWS-defined recovery strategies. The right choice depends on workload criticality, budget, and business impact tolerance:
Backup & Restore (RPO/RTO: Hours to days):
Dev/test environments, archive workloads, non-critical internal systems.
Pilot Light (RPO/RTO: Minutes to hours):
Internal business applications with moderate criticality and defined SLAs.
Warm Standby (RPO/RTO: Minutes):
Business-critical applications -ERP, CRM, core internal platforms.
Multi-Site Active/Active (RPO/RTO: Near-zero / Seconds):
Mission-critical workloads – banking cores, payment gateways, patient platforms, customer-facing digital services.
How Pentagon Builds the DR Architecture Layer by Layer
- Data Protection Layer: Pentagon deploys AWS Backup with centralized, policy-driven backup governance across RDS, DynamoDB, EFS, EC2, and EBS. Automated AMI snapshot schedules and cross-region copy rules ensure recovery data exists in geographically isolated locations.
- Database Replication Layer: For relational workloads, Pentagon configures RDS Multi-AZ deployments and Aurora Global Database replication. For sub-second RPOs on critical data, Aurora Global delivers asynchronous cross-region replication with typical lag under 1 second.
- Traffic Routing and Failover Layer: Pentagon configures Route 53 Health Checks with DNS failover policies to automate traffic cutover to DR regions. Combined with AWS Global Accelerator, routing failover executes in under 30 seconds without manual intervention.
- Infrastructure Automation Layer: Pentagon maintains AWS CloudFormation templates and Systems Manager Automation runbooks for each managed environment – enabling rapid, repeatable environment provisioning during failover and eliminating manual steps that cause RTO overruns.
- Validation and DR Drill Layer: Pentagon conducts periodic DR drills with documented, measured RTO and RPO outcomes. Drill results are reviewed with customers in operational service reviews and used to refine architecture and runbooks continuously.
Business Outcome: Organizations running Pentagon-managed DR architectures achieve stronger operational resilience, validated recovery capabilities aligned to their actual RPO/RTO targets, and the confidence that comes from knowing their DR plan has been tested – not just documented.
Prepared By: Biswajit Patasani,
Associate Operations Lead
Reviewed By: Parbat Singh
AVP- Managed Service- Cloud
