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[0:00]Hello, my name is Paul, and I'm a solutions architect at AWS. And in this session, we're going to talk about using modern applications to enhance business continuity. So in this session, we're going to talk about business continuity. What does that mean? What are some of the typical concerns? We're going to then talk about how we can enhance business continuity using modern applications. And we're going to focus on a number of areas where modern applications really enhance business continuity, including the elasticity and scalability that modern applications give you. The operational resilience that you get with modern applications, which is a major part of business continuity, as well as developer agility, which might not be something you immediately think of in terms of business continuity. And then we're going to wrap up with some next steps. So let's first talk about business continuity. What is business continuity? It's the capability of an organization to continue the delivery of products or services at acceptable predefined levels following a disruptive incident. So that could be a disruptive incident of any kind, whether it's a natural disaster, an outage in a data center, power outage, or any kind of disruptive incident, you want to be able to continue to provide your services or products to your customers. Now, business continuity is often paired with disaster recovery, and in fact, those terms are often used interchangeably. But really, disaster recovery is a subset of business continuity, meaning disaster recovery are the technical capabilities that enable you to recover from a disaster. Whereas business continuity is the overall strategy to make sure that your business can continue operating through any disruptive incident. So it's a much broader topic and includes many more considerations beyond just the technical ones. Now, we can think about business continuity in terms of the business continuity lifecycle, which goes from establishing a business continuity plan all the way through maintaining that plan. So it starts with the Business Impact Analysis, which is basically identifying what are the mission critical applications and what is the impact to your business if those applications are unavailable. Then you'd want to determine your recovery objectives. So if you have an outage, what is your recovery time objective? How quickly do you need to recover? And your recovery point objective, meaning how much data loss can you tolerate if you have an outage? Can you tolerate five minutes of data loss? Can you tolerate an hour of data loss? Can you tolerate no data loss? Those are your recovery objectives. Once you have your recovery objectives, you would then design your strategy and implement the strategy to meet your recovery objectives. And then, after you've implemented your strategy, you would want to test your strategy to make sure it's actually meeting your recovery objectives and that it's working as expected. And then, finally, you want to maintain your strategy and your plan, making sure that it evolves as your business and your applications evolve. So that's the overall business continuity lifecycle. And you can see that modern applications can play a role in really many of these different stages. Now, when we're thinking about business continuity, what are some of the typical concerns that organizations have? One of the major concerns is application availability, meaning you have an application that your customers are using or your employees are using. And if that application becomes unavailable, that can have a serious impact on your business. So you want to make sure your application is highly available. Another concern is data loss. Many applications, of course, have data, whether that's in a database or in a file system, or in some other format. And if that data is lost, that can be very catastrophic for your business. So you want to protect against data loss. And another concern is security vulnerabilities and data breaches. So you want to make sure that your applications are protected against those types of concerns. So, how can we address these concerns using modern applications? What do we mean by modern applications? Well, modern applications are generally built using microservices. So instead of a single monolithic application, you're building multiple services that work together. And those services are typically loosely coupled, meaning they're not tightly dependent on each other, so they can evolve independently. And modern applications often make use of serverless and container technologies, which we'll talk about more in a moment. They also generally implement data persistence using managed databases. So instead of managing the database yourself, you use a managed service. And they're also generally deployed using continuous integration and continuous deployment, meaning that your deployments are automated. And finally, modern applications generally use observability, meaning that you have logging and metrics and tracing for your applications so that you can see what's going on. So why do modern applications enhance business continuity? Well, we're going to talk about a few areas. First is elasticity and scalability. Then operational resilience, which, as I mentioned, is a major component of business continuity. And then developer agility. So let's start with elasticity and scalability. Now, with modern applications, you generally build those using microservices. And you can implement your microservices using serverless services like AWS Lambda or container services like Amazon Elastic Container Service. Or Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service. All of these services give you elasticity and scalability built in. What does that mean? That means that when you have an increased load, those services automatically scale up to meet the increased demand. And when the demand decreases, they automatically scale down so that you're only paying for the resources you're actually using. Now, why is that important for business continuity? Well, when you have an increase in demand, if your application can't handle that demand, that effectively becomes an outage for your customers. So you want to be able to scale up to meet the demand that you have and these modern application services give you that built in. Now, another aspect of modern applications are managed databases. So for example, with AWS, you have services like Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, and Amazon DynamoDB. All of these are managed database services, meaning that AWS manages the underlying infrastructure, the operating system, the patches, the backups, all of those underlying concerns are managed by AWS. And so you don't have to worry about those things. So that helps you with your business continuity, because you don't have to worry about the underlying infrastructure of the databases. And they also give you features like high availability and replication built in. So for example, with Amazon RDS, you can configure a multi-AZ deployment. Meaning that your database will automatically be replicated to another Availability Zone. And if you have a failure in one Availability Zone, it will automatically fail over to the other Availability Zone. So that gives you high availability built in to the database itself. Now, let's talk about operational resilience. This is a major part of business continuity and there are a number of ways that modern applications help you with operational resilience. First is microservices. So as I mentioned, modern applications generally use microservices. And this is very important for resilience, because when you have a monolithic application, if one part of that application fails, the entire application can fail. Whereas with microservices, if one service fails, the other services can continue to operate independently. So that gives you much more resilience than a monolithic application. You also have automated deployments. So as I mentioned, modern applications often use continuous integration and continuous deployment, meaning that you have automated deployments. And this is important for operational resilience, because when you're deploying manually, there's always a chance of human error. And if you have human error during a deployment, that can cause an outage. With automated deployments, you reduce the chance of human error. And it makes your deployments much more reliable. So that helps with operational resilience. Another aspect is observability, meaning logging, metrics, and tracing. And you want to have these for your applications so that you can see what's going on with your applications. And if you have an issue, you can quickly identify the root cause of that issue and resolve it. So observability is a key component of operational resilience. Another aspect of operational resilience is making sure that you have security built in to your applications and that you have a secure software development lifecycle. So you want to make sure that you're building secure applications from the start. And you also want to make sure that you have regular security audits and penetration testing to make sure that your applications are secure. And then finally, with modern applications, you can often implement multi-Region architectures. Meaning you can deploy your application to multiple AWS Regions so that if you have a catastrophic failure in one Region, your application can continue to operate in another Region. So that gives you a very high level of operational resilience. And then finally, let's talk about developer agility. As I mentioned, this might not be something you immediately think of when you think about business continuity. But it's actually very important. Because when you have developer agility, it means that your developers can quickly make changes to your applications and deploy those changes. And this is important for business continuity, because if you have an issue or a bug in your application, you want to be able to quickly fix that issue and deploy the fix. And if you have a slow deployment process, that can mean that your customers are experiencing an outage for a longer period of time. Whereas if you have developer agility and you can quickly deploy changes, you can quickly resolve issues. So this is very important for business continuity. So in summary, modern applications give you a number of benefits that enhance business continuity. They give you elasticity and scalability so that your applications can automatically scale to meet demand. They give you operational resilience through microservices, automated deployments, observability, and multi-Region architectures. And they give you developer agility so that you can quickly make changes and deploy those changes to your applications. So all of these aspects of modern applications really enhance your business continuity. So what are some next steps? First, assess your current applications. Determine what are your mission critical applications and what are their current business continuity capabilities. Then you can identify areas for improvement. Where can you enhance your business continuity using modern application principles? And then, finally, implement a modernization strategy. Start with a small, non-critical application and implement a modernization strategy. And then you can apply those lessons learned to your other applications. So that's the end of the session. Thank you very much for your time.