LSREL08-BP02 Design compliance-aware failover workflows
Architect failover mechanisms that explicitly maintain critical functions such as authentication, audit logging, and data validation. During the planning phase, map how these functions transition across components and zones, and include them in system qualification protocols.
Desired outcome: Failover processes preserve your regulatory state and do not bypass required controls.
Common anti-patterns:
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Assuming failover preserves compliance-aligned workflows without testing.
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Not qualifying the secondary environment.
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Logging or audit trails that break during transition.
Benefits of establishing this best practice: Maintains trust with regulators and reduces deviations during outages.
Level of risk exposed if this best practice is not established: High
Implementation guidance
Plan failover mechanisms alongside your core architecture, treating them as integral rather than auxiliary processes. Map how functions such as authentication, authorization, encryption, and audit logging persist across failover scenarios. Include these workflows in risk assessments and validation test plans to verify that they behave consistently under failover conditions.
Implementation steps
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Document failover workflows in architecture specifications and validate them with test evidence.
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Use AWS managed services to design automated failover with Amazon Route 53 health checks, Amazon RDS Multi-AZ failover, or Auto Scaling group replacements.
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Keep AWS CloudTrail, AWS Config, and Amazon CloudWatch monitoring active during failover, and include these checks in validation evidence to demonstrate persistence.
