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Disaster Recovery Plan

In this article, we describe the main disaster recovery strategies for the Regula IDV Platform and provide guidance on how to implement them effectively.

Four principal disaster-recovery (DR) strategies are commonly used:

  • Backup and Restore – Take regular backups of data and applications and restore them after an incident.
  • Pilot Light – Keep a minimal, always-on core of the environment while other components remain offline until needed.
  • Warm Standby – Maintain a reduced-capacity but fully functional environment that can be quickly scaled to full production.
  • Active-Active – Operate multiple fully functional environments in different locations and route traffic between them in real time.

Backup and Restore

Pros
- Simple to implement and manage.
- Cost-effective for small environments.
- Suitable for both data and application recovery.

Cons
- Long recovery-time and recovery-point objectives (RTO/RPO) – recovery can take hours or even days.

Pilot Light

Pros
- Faster recovery time than Backup and Restore.
- Cost-effective for small to medium environments.

Cons
- Requires more resources than Backup and Restore.

Warm Standby

Pros
- Faster recovery time than Pilot Light.
- Suitable for both data and application recovery.

Cons
- Requires more resources than Pilot Light.
- More complex to implement and manage.
- Higher cost than Pilot Light.

Active-Active

Pros
- Lowest RTO/RPO – near-instant failover.
- Can handle large-scale disasters.
- Provides high availability and load balancing.
- Supports both data and application recovery.

Cons
- Most complex to implement and manage.
- Requires significant resources and infrastructure.
- Highest cost of all strategies.

Implementation Guidance

Regula provides an on-premises solution that can also be deployed in cloud or hybrid environments. Because it is not cloud-native, the DR strategy must be implemented at the infrastructure level and remains the customer’s responsibility.

Recommendations:
- All components of the IDV solution are horizontally scalable; therefore any of the DR strategies above can be implemented.
- Choose a strategy that matches your recovery objectives, budget, and operational capacity.
- If you can leverage cloud-native services, Active-Active offers the best performance and availability.
- When budget or resources are limited, start with Backup and Restore and evolve to Pilot Light or Warm Standby over time.

Stateful-Component Replication

If you select Pilot Light, Warm Standby, or Active-Active, replicate stateful workloads between the primary and secondary sites:

  • MongoDB database – Use replica sets to replicate data; see the MongoDB replication documentation.
  • Object storage – Replicate file storage (for example, Amazon S3 or an on-premises S3-compatible platform such as MinIO) using the storage-provider’s native replication or a custom mechanism.
  • Vector/Text store – IDV uses either MongoDB Atlas or OpenSearch; both provide built-in replication. See the MongoDB Atlas or OpenSearch documentation.
  • RabbitMQ message broker – Enable RabbitMQ clustering or federation; refer to the RabbitMQ cluster guide.

Stateless-Component Deployment

All other IDV components are stateless and can be deployed in multiple sites by running additional instances and fronting them with load balancers:

  • Web Server
  • Workflow Service
  • Audit Service
  • Indexe