Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Strategy for a Global Football Event

Overview

A leading global Sports & Entertainment technology services provider needed a robust Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) strategy for a major global football event. The strategy required integration of both Azure cloud and on-premises workloads to ensure high availability and rapid recovery in the event of a disaster. The solution implemented used a pilot light approach, leveraging Azure DevOps pipelines for DR activation, and Terraform for provisioning stateless compute resources.

Challenges

Challenges

Ensuring consistent BCDR capabilities across both Azure and on-premises environments.

Implementing a disaster recovery solution that allows quick failover to minimize downtime during the event.

Maintaining data consistency and availability across geographically dispersed locations.

Automating the disaster recovery process to reduce manual intervention and potential errors.

Challenges

Solution Approach

- A minimal version of the environment was kept running in Azure to allow quick scaling up during a disaster.

- Critical on-premises workloads were continuously replicated to the Azure cloud, ready to be activated.

- A fully automated DR activation process was implemented using Azure DevOps pipelines, ensuring a reliable and repeatable recovery process.

- The pipeline enabled automated environment checks, resource scaling, and routing changes.

- Terraform was used to automate the provisioning of additional stateless compute resources in Azure during disaster recovery.

- Infrastructure as Code (IaC) ensured consistent and error-free deployment across cloud resources.

- The primary database actively replicated data to a read replica in a secondary Azure region.

- This setup provided high availability and immediate failover capabilities for the database layer.

Results

The pilot light approach ensured that critical components were always on standby, drastically reducing the time to recovery.

The use of Azure DevOps pipelines for DR activation streamlined the recovery process, making it faster and reducing human errors.

Continuous replication of databases ensured that no data was lost and that the system could quickly switch to the secondary site without data inconsistencies.

Terraform allowed rapid provisioning of resources when scaling from the pilot light to full capacity, accommodating sudden spikes in demand.

Procurement

Conclusion

The BCDR strategy developed for the global football event provided the client with a highly resilient and scalable solution that ensured continuity during critical times. By integrating Azure cloud solutions with on-premises workloads and employing cutting-edge tools like Terraform and Azure DevOps, the client could confidently manage the event’s infrastructure needs, ensuring a seamless experience for millions of visitors.

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