SAINTCON 2023 - James Cabe - Building an Isolated Recovery Environment

Building an isolated recovery environment is crucial for disaster recovery, automation is key, and a combination of people, process, and technology is required to ensure a robust approach.

Key takeaways
  • Building an isolated recovery environment is crucial for disaster recovery, especially in cases of natural disasters or cyber attacks.
  • It’s important to have a plan in place and be prepared to start the recovery process as quickly as possible.
  • Automation is key to speeding up the recovery process, and tools like Kubernetes and Docker can be used to automate the deployment of applications.
  • Immutable infrastructure is important for ensuring that data is not tampered with during the recovery process.
  • Having a separate network for the recovery environment, separate from the production network, is important for security and isolation.
  • Serial consoles and out-of-band management are important for managing devices during the recovery process.
  • Having a backup system in place is not sufficient for disaster recovery, and a more robust approach is needed.
  • Building a recovery environment requires a combination of people, process, and technology.
  • The author’s NIFO box is a solution for building a deployable recovery environment that can be shipped to a site and used for recovery.
  • The importance of automation is emphasized throughout the talk, with examples of automation being used to speed up the recovery process.
  • The author highlights the need for a prescriptive approach to disaster recovery, and provides examples of how this can be achieved.
  • The importance of having a clear understanding of the vulnerabilities in the infrastructure is also emphasized.
  • The talk also touches on the importance of having a backup strategy in place, and the need for regular testing and validation of the backup strategy.