A Strategic Imperative for Business Continuity
In today’s digitally driven landscape, business continuity hinges on the uninterrupted performance of mission-critical systems. Pega platforms—used for process orchestration, customer engagement, and case management—are foundational to enterprise operations. Downtime in these systems can result in financial losses, regulatory non-compliance, reputational damage, and diminished customer trust.
This whitepaper explores practical strategies for achieving High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) in Pega environments, incorporating real-world implementations, automation techniques, and architectural best practices. It draws on EvonSys MSP’s deep experience in deploying resilient Pega ecosystems across global enterprises.
Why High Availability & Disaster Recovery Matter in Pega Deployments
Pega systems are deeply embedded within organizational workflows, managing sensitive data and critical business processes. A robust HA/DR framework ensures:
- Minimized Downtime: Ensures critical functions remain operational, even during infrastructure failures or disasters.
- Data Integrity: Protects business data through replication and scheduled backups, critical in regulated industries.
- Customer Confidence: Service continuity builds trust, while frequent outages can erode satisfaction and loyalty.
- Regulatory Compliance: Supports adherence to legal and industry mandates for uptime, data retention, and disaster preparedness.
- Operational Resilience: Enhances the ability to respond swiftly to incidents without compromising service levels.
Real-World Deployment Models
1. Passive-Active Deployment
This cost-effective model involves a primary active region that handles all production traffic and a secondary passive region that continuously replicates data and configurations.
a.Real-World Use Case:
One of our clients, operating under strict compliance requirements, deployed this model with automated failover using DNS failover and load balancer reconfiguration. During a regional network outage, the system switched to the passive site within minutes, meeting their RTO and RPO goals without user impact.
2. Active-Active Deployment
Designed for mission-critical applications, this model involves running Pega instances concurrently across multiple regions. Traffic is intelligently distributed, and failures in any region automatically reroute workloads to healthy sites.
a. Real-World Use Case:
A multinational financial client leveraged Active-Active deployment to achieve 99.999% uptime. Using real-time replication and automated orchestration, the platform maintained seamless customer interactions across time zones, even during partial system failures.
Key Automation Tools and Techniques
EvonSys recommends the following DevOps practices and tools to automate and maintain HA/DR readiness:
| Area |
Tool/Technique |
Purpose |
| Monitoring & Failure Detection |
Datadog, Prometheus |
Real-time infrastructure and application health checks |
| Infrastructure Orchestration |
Ansible, Terraform |
Automates environment setup, DNS updates, and failover |
| Load Balancing |
AWS ELB, Azure Traffic Manager |
Distributes traffic; detects failures and redirects automatically |
| DNS Failover |
Route 53, Azure DNS |
Ensure seamless traffic redirection during outages |
| Backup & Recovery |
Veeam, AWS Backup, Azure Backup |
Scheduled, encrypted backups and tested recovery processes |
| CI/CD Change Management |
Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps |
Structured release processes with rollback capabilities |
Multi-Region Deployment Considerations
When planning for multi-region Pega environments, consider the following:
- Network Latency: Optimize inter-region connectivity to reduce user-perceived lag.
- Data Replication: Use synchronous replication for zero data loss or asynchronous replication to reduce performance overhead, depending on RPO objectives.
- Load Balancing: Ensure traffic is dynamically and efficiently balanced using health-aware load balancers.
- DNS Resilience: Configure DNS services with failover policies to quickly reroute traffic upon regional failures.
Failover Mechanisms: From Detection to Recovery
1. Automated Failover
- Ideal for critical systems requiring fast recovery with minimal human input.
- Works with continuous health monitoring and orchestration tools.
2. Manual Failover
- Used in scenarios where downtime is tolerable or where control is preferred during transitions.
Core Components of a Failover Strategy:
- Health Checks: App-level and infra-level checks with immediate alerting.
- Failure Detection: Monitor CPU, memory, storage, network latency, and app availability.
- Orchestration: Automate tasks such as service restarts, DNS updates, and traffic routing using tools like Ansible and Terraform.
- Validation: Regular failover drills to test assumptions and readiness.
Resilience Planning Beyond DR
Disaster recovery is one facet of a broader resilience strategy. Other critical elements include:
- Risk Assessment: Identify and mitigate potential points of failure—hardware, software, network, and third-party dependencies.\
- Infrastructure Redundancy: Design for N+1 redundancy in compute, storage, and networking components.
- Data Backup Strategy: Define backup schedules and store copies in offsite/immutable storage.
- Change Management: Enforce disciplined release cycles through CI/CD pipelines to avoid introducing instability.
Visual Aids & Decision Frameworks
We recommend including the following visual elements in the final publication:
1. Multi-Region Architecture Diagrams:
- Illustrate Passive-Active and Active-Active setups, including app servers, databases, replication paths, and failover flows.
2. Failover Workflow Diagram:
- Show how a failure is detected, triggered, and managed across regions using orchestration and monitoring tools.
3. RTO/RPO Comparison Matrix:
| Deployment Model |
RTO |
RPO |
Cost |
Complexity |
| Passive-Active |
<15 min |
<5 min |
$$ |
Low |
| Active-Active |
<5 min |
Near-zero |
$$$$ |
High |
Conclusion: Building a Resilient Pega Ecosystem
Ensuring high availability and disaster recovery for Pega environments requires more than just backup systems—it demands a resilient, well-orchestrated ecosystem. Organizations that proactively adopt multi-region deployment strategies, automation tools, and continuous validation are better equipped to meet customer expectations, regulatory demands, and performance SLAs.
EvonSys MSP specializes in designing, deploying, and managing highly available Pega platforms with enterprise-grade DR capabilities. From architecture planning to CI/CD implementation and compliance assurance, our end-to-end services ensure you're always prepared.
Let EvonSys MSP be your strategic partner in building a resilient, future-proof Pega ecosystem.
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