These questions were pulled from the AWS Well-Architected Framework and are considered the absolute minimum threshold for what is considered secure, reliable, performant, cost-efficient, and operationally excellent.

This list is based on years of experience working with customers and partners, and each of the questions represents the possibility of serious consequences if you don't pay attention to it. The history of the internet is rife with examples of companies that have gone out of business overnight due to a hacker gaining access to cloud resources, or a failed database resulting in a complete loss of customer data.

Here's one scenario to consider regarding the disaster recovery questions: what would happen to your company if a hacker gained access to your root access credentials, logged in to your production account, and proceeded to delete everything? What if your backups and audit logs were deleted from that account? Even a robust multi-AZ database setup with cross-region replication of backup files is not going to help you if every resource in the account is deleted. If you wake up one morning and find that your account is simply destroyed, can you recover? Will you still be in business the next day?

The answer to that question should be a confident yes!

The response to that absolute worst-case scenario should not only be rehearsed, but it should also be fully automated. By the way, I didn't just make up that scenario to scare you. It has happened many times, both on-premises and on cloud systems. More often than not, it's a disgruntled employee with administrator privileges who has gone rogue, but whether it's an employee or a hacker, the results are the same.

By following the recommendations of the technology baseline review, you can make that scenario much less likely, and even if it does happen, you can be confident in your ability to recover from it.

Once you have made the necessary changes to pass this review with a 100% score, you are ready to dive deeper into the Well-Architected Framework to make even more improvements to your cloud-based applications.