Claims platform: Regional recovery in minutes

Challenge brief

A claims-processing platform for a regional insurer runs entirely in one AWS Region on EC2, Amazon RDS, and Amazon S3, and it has to keep accepting claims through a complete Regional outage. The business has signed an RPO measured in seconds and an RTO measured in minutes, so the recovery Region has to answer live requests immediately rather than after a rebuild. Finance approved continuous database replication and a small standing footprint in the second Region, but not a second full-size production fleet running all day. The platform team already deploys with infrastructure as code and rehearses a failover every quarter, and it accepts that scaling the recovery Region up to full capacity is part of the cutover. Which disaster recovery strategy fits every stated objective at the approved cost?

Success criteria

• 1.Add the Region that serves production claims today.
• 2.Add one warm standby: a scaled-down but fully functional copy of the platform, already running in the recovery Region.
• 3.Add continuous data replication so the recovery Region stays seconds behind the primary.
• 4.Connect the primary Region to the warm standby and the warm standby to the data it replicates.
• 5.Leave the always-on second production fleet out; finance approved a scaled-down footprint, not active-active.
• 6.Leave a pilot light out; application servers that are switched off must be deployed before they can answer, which the minutes-level RTO does not allow.

Service palette