Case Studies | FinTech

Ready to fail over in minutes, not hours

Atlas BCP Multi-Region DR

About

A FinTech business working with Cloud Combinator on AWS. The client is anonymised at their request.

Challenge

Building disaster recovery for a live, data-heavy platform without disrupting production raised three focus areas.

Recovery objectives with zero data loss

Atlas needed a documented Recovery Time Objective of 30 to 35 minutes and a Recovery Point Objective of under one second for its Aurora

Replicating a large estate across regions cost-effectively

The DR region had to mirror production networking, compute and supporting services, and accommodate the 90TB the platform client dataset through cross-region replication, while keeping total monthly spend within a 2,806 to 3,146 USD range, a controlled 26 to 41 percent increase over the existing baseline.

Migrating encryption without breaking SLAs

The existing Aurora cluster required migration to KMS encryption via snapshot, restore and validation, performed within an agreed maintenance window and without impacting production service levels, before Global Database replication to CA-Central-1 could be established.

Solution

Cloud Combinator delivered the disaster recovery capability across five milestones within the 120-day window, each building on the last from networking foundations through to tested failover and operational handover.

30-35 min

Documented Recovery Time Objective validated by timed failover test

<1 sec

Recovery Point Objective for the Aurora Global Database

90TB

The platform client dataset replicated cross-region to the DR region

By the numbers:

  • 30-35 min - Documented Recovery Time Objective validated by timed failover test
  • <1 sec - Recovery Point Objective for the Aurora Global Database
  • 90TB - The platform client dataset replicated cross-region to the DR region
Changes

Cloud Combinator delivered and validated a tested warm-standby DR capability for Atlas, with acceptance requiring a successful demonstration of automated failover within the

  • Automated failover — Route53 health checks trigger ECS auto-scaling in CA-Central-1, moving Atlas from single-region exposure to a rehearsed, automatic recovery path.
  • Sub-second data protection — Aurora Global Database replication, following a KMS encryption migration, holds RPO under one second with zero data loss confirmed in testing.
  • Cost-controlled resilience — The warm-standby model keeps additional monthly spend within the 2,806 to 3,146 USD target range, a projected 26 to 41 percent increase over the 2,232 USD baseline, avoiding the cost of active-active.
  • Governed and tagged — A comprehensive tagging strategy with budget alerts and Cost Explorer integration gives clear DR-versus-production cost attribution across the Atlas accounts.
  • Handover — DR runbooks covering failover, failback and validation, operational team training, and an established quarterly DR test schedule with the first test executed equipped the client to own the capability.

Documented RTO, confirmation of sub-second Aurora RPO, zero data loss during failover testing, delivered runbooks, completed team training, and sign-off that the DR environment is suitable for continued operation on a quarterly testing cadence.

With a proven failover path in place, the client is positioned to extend DR coverage to the platform account once confirmed, sustain the quarterly test cadence, and build on the multi-region foundation as the platform grows.

AWS Stack

Amazon Aurora Global Database

(PostgreSQL) for cross-region database replication with sub-second RPO and encrypted, tested failover.

Amazon ECS Fargate

With an Application Load Balancer for standby compute that scales from zero on failover to serve production traffic.

Amazon Route53

For health-check-based automated failover routing between EU-West-1 and CA-Central-1.

Amazon S3

Cross-region replication and AWS Transfer Family for replicating UI assets and the 90TB the platform dataset and DR-region client file delivery.

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