2025 trends in resilience: Setting up multi-region foundations in Australia

The cloud is now at the heart of business operations, and keeping things running smoothly – no matter what – is a top priority. When AWS launched its Melbourne Region in 2023, Australian businesses were provided a solid option to build more resilient architectures.

Whether it’s meeting strict compliance requirements or ensuring disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity, 2025 is all about smarter, more adaptive systems that don’t just survive disruptions but keep everything running seamlessly.

What’s shaping resilience in 2025?

A few key trends are changing the game when it comes to resilience:

  • Stricter compliance rules – If you’re in finance, healthcare, or government, you’re probably seeing more regulations around data residency and business continuity. Meeting these standards means planning carefully and following frameworks like APRA CPS 230 and the Australian Government’s Essential Eight security strategies.
  • Automated recovery and failover – More businesses are ditching manual recovery plans and moving to automated failover solutions. AWS services like Route 53, Global Accelerator, and AWS CloudFormation StackSets make it possible to switch regions quickly and without human intervention.
  • Keeping data in Australia – Data sovereignty is a big deal, and many businesses want to keep their data within Australian borders. With AWS Melbourne now available, it’s easier to store and process critical data locally without relying on just one region.
  • Always-on architectures – Instead of setting up a single region with a backup plan, businesses are moving to active-active setups. This means distributing workloads across multiple regions for better performance, availability, and disaster recovery.
  • Learning from past outages – We’ve all seen big outages in the last few years. Whether it’s major cloud failures hitting financial services in Australia in 2023, telecom networks going down and affecting emergency services, or government system failures, these events have shown why multi-region setups matter. AWS Melbourne and Sydney Regions together offer businesses a chance to avoid similar headaches in the future.

Getting multi-region ready in Australia

If you’re thinking about making the jump to a multi-region setup, here’s where to start:

1. Sort out your data protection strategy

Having a clear data replication plan is key for resilience. The one thing you can’t easily get back is your customer data, so ensure you start your multi-region journey evaluating critical data stores and establishing a “Data Bunker” pattern in the secondary region.

Once you have your data safe, you can then start to look at more active-active data patterns and real-time replications.

Consider using things like:

  • Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication (CRR) for storage between Melbourne and Sydney.
  • AWS Backup to keep automated backups across multiple regions.
  • Amazon RDS, EBS and FSx snapshot sharing approaches to ensure critical data is backed up in multiple regional locations
  • Amazon DynamoDB Global Tables for an active-active NoSQL database setup.

2. Get your networking right

Once your data is secure, you can then start to look at how you can then access and benefit from the secondary region. This will require establishment of networking and connectivity into this region.

Use AWS Transit Gateway, VPC Peering, and AWS Direct Connect to make sure data moves quickly and smoothly. AWS Global Accelerator can also help route traffic more efficiently across regions.

We recommend three levels of networking “readiness” at the initial stage:

  • Cold-start networking where you have a proven network (defined via IaC) architecture that can be enabled within 4-24hrs within the secondary region.
  • Pilot-light networking where a small level of network components are actively deployed and operating providing connectivity and secure private data paths.
  • Active networking where actual DR workloads are hosted and providing a replication destination for the live source of truth.
 

Each of these three levels increase in build and operating cost as a trade-off for reduction in RTO during a regional failure event.

3. Make sure security scales with you

Australian organisations have operated in a single region mode for a long time, so it’s important that your platform security and access is reviewed and configured to support a multi-region approach.

Things to consider are:

  • Use AWS Organizations and Control Tower to keep policies consistent.
  • Review existing AWS IAM service control policies for multi-region readiness.
  • Monitor security with AWS Security Hub and GuardDuty across multiple regions.

4. Deploying apps across regions

Consistency is everything when setting up applications in multiple regions. Use AWS CloudFormation, AWS CDK, or Terraform to make sure infrastructure stays uniform.

Key things to consider:

  • Deploy AWS Lambda and API Gateway with redundancy in both regions.
  • Use consistent container-based architectures to ensure consistency of compute configuration across regions.
  • Set up AWS Route 53 and Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) for smart traffic routing, including automated failover.

5. Test resilience before you need it

Building a multi-region setup is great, but you need to make sure it works when disaster strikes. Injecting chaos and actually testing the solution is the only way to truly know how your system will respond. Leveraging AWS Fault Injection Simulator (FIS) lets you simulate failures and see how well your recovery plans hold up.

Future-proofing with multi-region resilience

AWS’s Melbourne Region is a big win for Australian businesses looking for better resilience. Whether you’re focused on compliance, disaster recovery, or performance, having a multi-region strategy isn’t just nice to have – it’s becoming essential.

By laying the right foundations in networking, data replication, application deployment, resilience testing, and security, businesses can fully take advantage of what multi-region architecture has to offer. Those who invest in adaptive, resilient cloud environments today will be far better prepared for whatever challenges come next.

So, is your business ready for the next step in resilience? Now’s the time to plan for a future where multi-region setups are the norm, not the exception.

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