Disaster Recovery Compliance in the cloud, Part 1, Common Mis-conceptions

Compliance in the cloud can seem challenging, especially for organizations in heavily regulated sectors such as financial services. Regulated financial institutions (FIs) must comply with laws and regulations (often in multiple jurisdictions), global security standards, their own corporate policies, and even contractual obligations with their customers and counterparties. These various compliance requirements may impose constraints on how their workloads can be architected for the cloud, and may require interpretation on what FIs must do in order to be compliant. It’s common for FIs to make assumptions regarding their compliance requirements, which can result in unnecessary costs and increased complexity, and might not align with their strategic objectives. A modern, rationalized approach to compliance can help FIs avoid imposing unnecessary constraints while meeting their mandatory requirements.
In my role as an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Compliance Specialist, I work with our financial services customers to identify, assess, and determine solutions to address their compliance requirements as they move to the cloud. One of the most common challenges customers ask me about is how to comply with disaster recovery (DR) requirements for workloads they plan to run in the cloud. In this blog post, I share some of the typical misconceptions FIs have about DR compliance in the cloud. In Part 2, I outline a structured approach to designing compliant architectures for your DR workloads. As my primary market is Canada, the examples in this blog post largely pertain to FIs operating in Canada, but the principles and best practices are relevant to regulated organizations in any country.

Author: Dan MacKay, FS Compliance Specialist, AWS

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