AWS for Disaster Recovery

Using AWS for Disaster Recovery for State of Maryland Web Services 

October 2012 – In light of the approaching “Super Storm” Hurricane Sandy, Maryland Governor made a strategic decision enabling the Maryland Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) to continuously broadcast and distribute vital information on storm position and remediation efforts to the citizens of Maryland.

Having experienced outages at the datacenter hosting MEMA site in the past during other weather events, A&T Systems proposed the State allow us to quickly configure and deploy redundant instances in the Amazon Web Services cloud. MEMA site would then failover to AWS during the active life of the storm to avert any downtime at the datacenter.

In a matter of hours, A&T built the required instances, installed applications and transferred the required data to the AWS Zone. As a result, there was no downtime during the storm and during the aftermath when power and bandwidth were intermittent to the datacenter. The Governor of Maryland commended A&T on our outstanding foresight and execution.

Based on that experience, Maryland officials subsequently made the decision to allow A&T to use AWS as a disaster recovery site for all aspects of the Maryland Web Services datacenter.