Geographic Resilience
Regional AWS outages are rare but devastating when they occur. Without cross-region backups, a complete regional failure means your backups are unavailable when you need them most. Cross-region replication ensures your data exists in multiple geographies for true disaster recovery.
How It Works
Air Gap Recover uses AWS-native replication technologies to copy your data across regions:
- S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) - Automatic object-level replication for S3 buckets
- EBS Snapshot Copy - Automated snapshot copying to target regions
- RDS Snapshot Copy - Cross-region database snapshot replication
- Aurora Global Database - Sub-second replication for Aurora clusters
Replication Architecture
You configure a primary backup region and one or more secondary regions. All snapshots and backups are automatically replicated to secondary regions with minimal lag. During recovery, you can choose to restore in any region where data has been replicated.
Use Cases
Regional Outage Recovery
If your primary AWS region experiences a complete outage, fail over to a secondary region. All your backup data is already there, ready for immediate recovery. No waiting for data transfers across regions during the crisis.
Compliance Requirements
Many regulatory frameworks require geographic separation of production and backup data. Examples include:
- GDPR - Data residency and geographic diversity requirements
- SOC 2 - Geographic separation for DR testing
- HIPAA - Geographic redundancy for protected health information
- Financial Services - Multi-region backup requirements
Data Sovereignty
Keep backup data in specific regions to comply with data sovereignty laws. For example, EU data can be backed up to eu-west-1 and replicated to eu-central-1, ensuring all copies remain within the European Union.
Performance & Cost
Intelligent Replication
Air Gap Recover only replicates changed data, not entire snapshots. This minimizes data transfer costs and replication time. For large databases, incremental replication reduces cross-region data transfer by 90%+.
Configurable RPO
Set your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) per resource:
- Critical resources - Replicate every snapshot (RPO <15 minutes)
- Important resources - Replicate hourly snapshots (RPO 1 hour)
- Standard resources - Replicate daily snapshots (RPO 24 hours)
Failover Process
When you need to fail over to a secondary region:
- Select target region from Air Gap Recover console
- Choose recovery point (most recent or specific timestamp)
- Initiate recovery—same instant recovery process as primary region
- Resources launch in target region from local snapshots
- Update DNS or routing to point to new region