Practical Disaster Recovery for a Write-Heavy Healthcare Platform

Executive Summary

Ficode helped a specialist veterinary orthopaedic planning platform implement a practical AWS disaster recovery solution designed to protect critical clinical operations and maintain data integrity. As the platform became increasingly important to healthcare professionals, the organisation required a resilient business continuity strategy capable of handling regional outages without disrupting user workflows.

After evaluating the platform’s write-heavy architecture and collaborative workflows, Ficode recommended an Active-Passive Disaster Recovery model on AWS. The solution included a warm standby environment, automated health monitoring, controlled database promotion, and intelligent traffic switching.

By leveraging AWS-native services and automation, the organisation gained a reliable recovery framework that reduces downtime, minimises operational risk, and preserves application consistency during unexpected disruptions.

Client Overview

The client operates a specialist veterinary orthopaedic planning platform used by healthcare professionals to manage clinical cases, treatment planning, medical imaging, and collaborative workflows.

As platform adoption increased, ensuring continuous availability became a business priority. Any prolonged service interruption could impact clinical operations, user productivity, and access to important patient-related information.

The organisation required an AWS disaster recovery solution that could maintain business continuity while preserving data consistency across active user sessions. Ficode was engaged to design a scalable and cost-effective disaster recovery strategy aligned with the platform’s operational requirements and future growth plans.

Business Challenges

The platform processes continuous clinical activity, including case updates, image uploads, notifications, and collaborative user interactions. This created several disaster recovery challenges.

A traditional multi-active architecture introduced potential risks such as conflicting updates, session synchronisation issues, and inconsistent data across regions. Since healthcare professionals often worked on shared records simultaneously, maintaining data accuracy was essential.

The organisation needed a solution that could:

• Protect against regional AWS outages.
• Maintain data consistency during active sessions.
• Minimise recovery time.
• Reduce operational complexity.
• Support future scalability.
• Provide a validated recovery process.
• Lower infrastructure costs compared to multi-region active deployments.

Another key requirement was automation. The client wanted to avoid manual failover procedures that could introduce delays or errors during high-pressure incidents.

Ficode needed to design a disaster recovery model that balanced resilience, operational simplicity, and business continuity without compromising the integrity of clinical workflows.

Ficode Solution

Ficode designed and implemented an Active-Passive Disaster Recovery architecture on AWS.

The primary production environment remained in Ireland, while a warm standby environment was maintained in the APAC region. Critical services, infrastructure configurations, databases, and application components were continuously synchronised between regions.

To improve reliability, Ficode implemented automated monitoring and disaster recovery workflows. Continuous health checks monitored the production environment and triggered recovery actions only after confirming a sustained outage.

Before initiating failover, the solution validated standby readiness, ensuring application services, databases, and infrastructure components were operational.

The automated recovery process included:

• Confirm primary region failure.
• Validate standby environment readiness.
• Promote Amazon DocumentDB replicas.
• Promote Redis replication.
• Promote Amazon RDS PostgreSQL databases.
• Verify application functionality.
• Redirect traffic using AWS Global Accelerator.
• Notify operational teams.

This approach reduced manual intervention, improved recovery confidence, and ensured business continuity during exceptional events.

Implementation Process

Ficode began by assessing the platform’s architecture, application dependencies, user session behavior, and data flows.

Based on the findings, an Active-Passive strategy was selected as the most suitable approach. The APAC standby environment was configured to mirror the primary production infrastructure and remain continuously synchronised.

Automated monitoring, validation checks, and recovery workflows were then implemented using AWS-native services. Multiple failover scenarios were tested to ensure recovery processes worked as expected.

The final solution included clear operational procedures covering outage detection, database promotion, traffic switching, application validation, and recovery auditing.

This structured approach enabled the organisation to respond quickly and confidently to potential service disruptions.

Security & Scalability

Security and scalability were core design considerations throughout the project.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policies helped secure infrastructure access, while replication and backup mechanisms protected critical business data.

The architecture supports future growth through containerised services, automated infrastructure management, and cloud-native AWS services. Additional regions, monitoring capabilities, and automation workflows can be added as business requirements evolve.

This ensures the platform remains secure, resilient, and prepared for future expansion.

Results & Business Impact

The disaster recovery solution delivered significant operational and business benefits.

Improved Business Continuity

The organisation now has a validated recovery strategy capable of supporting critical healthcare operations during regional disruptions.

Enhanced Data Consistency

The Active-Passive architecture reduces the risk of conflicting updates and session-related issues.

Reduced Recovery Uncertainty

Automated validation and failover processes minimise human error and improve recovery confidence.

Lower Operational Complexity

The solution provides meaningful resilience without the complexity of a fully active multi-region deployment.

Greater Stakeholder Confidence

Documented recovery procedures and testing improve governance, compliance readiness, and operational transparency.

Scalable Foundation for Growth

The AWS architecture provides a future-ready platform that can evolve alongside business and regulatory requirements.

Additional numeric impact to validate:

• DR confidence improved from informal recovery planning to a defined 6-step controlled recovery workflow.
• Indicative 35???50% lower operating complexity compared with an active-active model for this write-heavy clinical workflow.
• 100% removal of ad hoc manual DNS switching from the planned failover path by using a controlled global traffic mechanism.
• Indicative 30???50% faster recovery execution once DR runbooks, automation, and validation steps are approved through drills.

Conclusion

Ficode successfully implemented an AWS disaster recovery solution tailored to the operational needs of a healthcare-focused platform. By adopting an Active-Passive architecture, the organisation achieved stronger business continuity, improved operational control, and enhanced data consistency.

The solution demonstrates how AWS disaster recovery best practices can deliver resilience, scalability, and cost efficiency without unnecessary complexity. With a validated recovery framework in place, the organisation is well-positioned to support future growth and evolving business requirements.