CASA-Compliant DR Design for an Aviation Parts Supplier

An aviation component supplier needed a disaster recovery design that would satisfy CASA compliance requirements, driven directly by an audit finding rather than an incident or a new build. The catch was the platform itself: a vendor system built on an old, non-modern stack, with its data layer sitting in a multi-user Microsoft Access database.

The constraint

Access databases aren't designed for the kind of DR patterns you'd normally reach for — there's no built-in replication, no clustering, no supported way to keep a live standby in sync. On top of that, it was multi-user, so the file was under continuous write contention during business hours, which ruled out simply copying it at will without risking a corrupt or inconsistent snapshot.

The approach

With no ability to change the vendor's tech stack, the DR design worked at the file level rather than the database level: scheduled, consistent snapshots of the Access database were captured and replicated out to a DR location, timed and coordinated around the application's usage patterns to avoid capturing the file mid-write. This traded the near-zero RPO you'd get from a modern replicated database for a pragmatic, auditable recovery point that was achievable given the constraints of the underlying platform.

Outcome

The design gave Aviation Component Services a documented, auditable recovery process that met CASA's expectations for controlled recoverability — without requiring a rebuild or replacement of the underlying vendor platform, which wasn't on the table for this engagement.