Background:

Kaleido Bioscience is a Life Science company based out of Lexington, MA who is working to
design and analyze the microbiome system and provide adaptive solutions. They rely on AWS
as their main cloud provider where they host all their data on. With all the data behind hosted
AWS, we at QPAIR was asked to backups and prepare them for DR. The goal was to Prepare
for Data Loss and Recover critical production infrastructure and Applications with Data within 24
Hours

Problem:

Kaleido wanted DR and Backup solutions from QPAIR, who are the APN partner managing their
AWS infrastructure at that point of time. Cross Account and Cross Region RDS backups for
Postgres and Mysql Databases. This scenario covers the following DR scenarios: Hacker Nuked
AWS Account, Data Corruption, us-east-1 Region Failures, Key Employee Left the Company,
Main AWS Account Access Compromised.

The Solution:

This is a typical Disaster Recovery Framework we develop for our clients.

 
DR Tier  Criticality  Business Criticality  RPO  RTO  FExercise  Data Replication 
(Prod)  Measure  (data loss)  (time to recover)  Frequency  & DR Site 
(minimum) 
Support 
Infrastructure for 
critical business 
Foundational 
Tier 0  systems eg. AD,  Varies by App  Varies by App  2 / year   
Infrastructure 
AWS Cloud Main 
Account, Prod 
VPC, etc 
Critical business 
Mission  function, revenue 
Tier 1  Critical  impacting,  4-24 hrs  24 hours  2 / year   
Applications  security, brand, 
etc 
Highly important 
function, longer 
Tier 2  Critical  4-48 hrs  1 - 7 days  Annually   
RTO than Tier 1 
acceptable 
1 week +  Infra recovery 
Important business    procedures 
Tier 3  Important  function, longer  48 hours  (will vary by app  2x / year.   
RTO acceptable  requirements and   
complexity)  No app 
testing 
performed - 
Non-critical 
Tier 4  escalate to 
Non-Critical  business functions  48 hours  12 weeks+  THi 
  TIER 1 or 2 if 
during a disaster 
DR testing 
required 
QPAIR being Advanced Consulting Partners, were able to successfully run disaster recovery
being delivered as infrastructure as code. Based on the Tier we have scheduled the automated
backups which includes copying all the snapshots to different regions/accounts.

For this client we have used AWS backup extensively as one of the main services. We have
created a custom backup/DR solution using terraform & ansible that uses centralized AWS
backup solution that automates creation, retention and deletion of snapshots for AWS services
like EFS, RDS, EBS.
RDS Cross Account and Cross Region Backups

Success Story:
QPAIR’s solutions provided Kaleido Biosciences with success as they were able to recover their
data and minimize downtime. Kaleido now has a successful automated disaster recovery
strategy and are backed up in multiple regions/accounts. God Forbid if a disaster strikes,
Kaleido will be ready and will have minimum downtime as their data is backed up and protected.