Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity

Executive Summary

Viddarpan understands that schools rely on our platform for daily operations, from marking attendance to processing fee payments. Our Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity Plan (BCP) are engineered to guarantee high availability, minimize data loss, and ensure rapid restoration of services in the event of an outage.

High Availability Architecture

We have designed our infrastructure to eliminate single points of failure.

• Multi-Availability Zone Deployment: Our application servers and databases are deployed across multiple, isolated Availability Zones (AZs) within our cloud region. If one data center experiences a failure (e.g., power loss, network outage), traffic is seamlessly routed to the remaining healthy zones.
• Auto-Scaling: During sudden traffic spikes (such as report card release days or fee deadlines), our infrastructure automatically scales up to handle the load without degrading performance.

Data Backup and Retention

Protecting your data against accidental deletion, corruption, or catastrophic failure is our primary objective.

Backup Strategy

1. Continuous Replication: Primary databases are synchronously replicated to standby instances in real-time.
2. Automated Snapshots: We take full, automated snapshots of all databases and file storage every 24 hours.
3. Transaction Logs: We backup transaction logs continuously, allowing for Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR) with a granularity of up to 5 minutes.

Backup Security

All backups are encrypted at rest using AES-256 and are stored in geographically distinct locations from the primary database to protect against region-wide disasters.

Recovery Objectives

Our disaster recovery strategy is measured against two key metrics:

Recovery Time Objective (RTO)

Target: < 4 Hours RTO is the maximum acceptable duration of an outage. In a severe disaster scenario requiring a full failover to a secondary region, our goal is to restore core Viddarpan services within 4 hours.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO)

Target: < 5 Minutes RPO represents the maximum acceptable amount of data loss. Due to our continuous transaction log backups, in a worst-case scenario, data loss would be limited to the last 5 minutes of activity.

Incident Response and Communication

During an outage, clear and timely communication is critical.

1. Detection: Our automated monitoring systems detect anomalies and page our 24/7 on-call engineering team immediately.
2. Triage: Engineers assess the severity and impact of the incident.
3. Communication: Within 30 minutes of a confirmed major outage, we will post updates to our public Status Page and send notifications to designated school administrators.
4. Resolution: Our team works continuously until the service is fully restored.
5. Post-Mortem: Following any significant downtime, we conduct a blameless post-mortem analysis and publish a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) report outlining what happened and what steps we are taking to prevent a recurrence.

Annual DR Testing

A disaster recovery plan is only as good as its execution. Viddarpan conducts comprehensive disaster recovery simulations at least annually. These drills ensure our team is trained, our recovery procedures are accurate, and our RTO/RPO targets are achievable in practice.