Multi-Cloud Disaster Recovery for PingOne Advanced Services

For a global consultancy with 400,000 employees, identity isn't just an IT service—it's the heartbeat of the business. Every hour of downtime for such a massive workforce represents a staggering loss in billable potential and client trust.

Access Identified have completed building out an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) disaster recovery (DR) environment to protect a triple-region PingOne Advanced Services (P1AS) deployment to provide the ultimate insurance policy.

The Story of the "Global Compass"

Imagine a global fleet of 400,000 consultants spread across 50 countries and 5 continents. To do their work, they rely on a Global Compass—a sophisticated, managed guidance system powered by PingOne Advanced Services (P1AS). This system is already world-class, operating out of three massive, high-tech AWS hubs (Regions) to ensure that if one hub has a local issue, the others seamlessly pick up the slack.

However, the company’s leadership understands a critical risk: Cloud Concentration. Even with three AWS regions, the entire "Compass" still relies on one provider's global backbone. In the absolute worst-case scenario—a "black swan" event affecting the provider’s global identity plane—400,000 experts would be left "blind," unable to log in, access client data, or submit the deliverables that drive the firm's multi-billion dollar revenue.

Our mission was to build the Emergency Beacon on Azure.

The "Break Glass" Solution: By replicating the P1AS environment onto Azure AKS, we created a truly multi-cloud disaster recovery strategy. If the primary "Compass" (AWS) ever falters globally, the company can immediately switch and restore identity services on a completely different cloud infrastructure via a single DNS change.

Sovereignty & Control: While P1AS is a managed service where Ping handles the heavy lifting, the AKS environment gives the firm's internal team the "Second Key." They now have the portability to run their core identity stack independently if they ever need to.
Resilience at Scale: For 400,000 users, "standard" backup isn't enough. The Azure AKS-based replication ensures that the high-performance directory and authentication needs of a massive global workforce are met, maintaining continuity without missing a beat.

In this story, P1AS is the high-performance Identity engine that runs the business every day across its three AWS regions. But the Azure AKS environment is the "Lifeboat" that ensures 400,000 consultants stay productive, even if the primary cloud sea becomes unnavigable.

Project: Multi-Cloud Identity Resilience (AKS x P1AS)

For an organisation of 400,000 employees, identity is the mission-critical backbone of billable operations. While their primary PingOne Advanced Services (P1AS) environment is robustly hosted across three AWS regions, the firm required a "fail-safe" against cloud-provider-level outages. This project successfully deployed a Disaster Recovery (DR) environment on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), providing a cross-cloud redundancy strategy that secures continuity for their global workforce even in "black swan" scenarios.

The Business Value of Multi-Cloud DR

Zero-Downtime Continuity: Replicating P1AS on Azure AKS ensures that if the global AWS backbone faces a catastrophic failure, 400,000 consultants remain productive by failing over to a completely independent cloud infrastructure.
Operational Sovereignty: By owning a self-managed AKS environment, the firm gains a "Second Key" to its identity stack, reducing vendor lock-in and providing a testing ground for critical updates without impacting the live P1AS production environment.
Regulatory & Security Alignment: This dual-cloud approach helps meet strict global data sovereignty and compliance requirements by ensuring identity data remains available and resilient across geographically and provider-diverse regions.