Affordable

Enterprise-Grade
Disaster Recovery
Using AWS
Affordable Enterprise-Grade Disaster Recovery Using AWS

Introduction will also touch upon the benefits and risks of each strategy,
to help your organization decide if leveraging the cloud,
Until recently, enterprise-grade disaster recovery had
and specifically AWS, for DR is the right approach for your
been prohibitively expensive for most organizations.
business.
Thanks to the rapid development of cloud infrastructure,
organizations can now attain top-of-the-line disaster
recovery capabilities into AWS at a fraction of the cost.
On-Premises Disaster Recovery
Enterprises have traditionally handled IT disaster recovery
The Challenge internally. Keeping a robust on-premises DR solution
An enterprise-grade disaster recovery (DR) solution is no in place and up-to-date requires a large investment of
longer something that is “nice to have.” Nor can it be a resources.
document approved by the Board of Directors but hasn’t
been touched or tested in years. Why not? In addition to Hardware: Most on-premises DR solutions depend on the
the probability of damaging your hard-earned reputation, purchase of duplicate servers on-site or at a secondary
downtime also comes with major costs. Gartner estimates location to be used in the event of an outage. These servers
the average cost of IT downtime at $5,600 per minute, incur both CapEx and ongoing IT operating expenses
which can add up quickly. (including power and cooling). Moreover, they typically
require a hardware refresh every three to five years.
If your organization is like other large-scale businesses
today, you understand the critical need to recover rapidly Software Licenses: In order to launch recovery machines
from IT outages, application failures, or malicious attacks in when source machines fail, on-premises DR solutions
order to ensure business resilience, stay competitive, and commonly require maintaining duplicate third-party
avoid regulatory penalties. Not only do your employees software licenses and, in some cases, application- or
need to access company systems 24/7, but your global DR-specific replication software. This can lead to high
customers also expect constant availability. expenditures, especially for enterprises that use costly
applications from vendors such as Oracle, SAP, and
So what’s the problem? Why don’t all enterprises have Microsoft.
airtight, 100% reliable, and frequently tested disaster
recovery strategies in place? Can’t IT departments just DR Infrastructure & Services: Any IT resilience solution
set up multiple data centers that continually replicate must be able to restore entire systems to their pre-disaster
workloads, and when a disaster strikes, redirect to the DR state. On-premises DR solutions require the purchase of
site? data protection software and, in certain cases, replication
appliances. If the organization needs enterprise-grade
It turns out that for many organizations, traditional RTOs and RPOs, they have to pay for duplicate compute
enterprise-grade DR solutions – with near-zero Recovery and storage infrastructure at their DR site.
Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives
(RTOs) – are prohibitively expensive due to heavy capital Management & Monitoring: IT staff resources are
expenditures (CapEx) and/or costly duplicate third-party necessary to continually manage and monitor the DR
software and services. hardware, software, and infrastructure.

As a result, some organizations choose to take the risk of

having only a backup system, which enables data retrieval, Disaster Recovery as a Service
but does not prevent costly downtime because of its long In light of the high costs and expertise needed to implement
data recovery times. Other companies choose to protect on-premises DR, many organizations turn to third-party
only the most essential servers, which leaves their business Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) providers to
vulnerable. Many companies that do lay out a substantial administer failover support in the event of a disaster. The
initial investment in DR later dedicate resources to other quality of this kind of DR solution depends on the particular
pressing IT needs. But “set it and forget it” doesn’t work for DRaaS provider’s technology, processes, and service-level
DR — a system that quickly becomes obsolete if not tested agreements (SLAs).
frequently.
Hardware: When using DRaaS, organizations do not need
The solution to this challenge lies in the cloud. Today, to purchase duplicate servers or maintain a duplicate data
businesses can attain top-of-the-line IT resilience at a center on their own. Rather, their duplicate servers are
fraction of the cost by moving their DR to the cloud. located in data centers or colocation centers run by their
DRaaS provider.
In this white paper, we examine the three main DR
strategies that are currently used by enterprises — On- Software Licenses: Depending on the applications
Premises Disaster Recovery, Disaster Recovery as a protected and replication methods used, organizations
Service (DRaaS), and Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery – may still need to purchase duplicate licenses for their
with a focus on the expected costs of each strategy. We applications if they want them to be available quickly during
a disaster.

White Paper | 2 ©2019 CloudEndure Ltd. All Rights Reserved www.cloudendure.com

Affordable Enterprise-Grade Disaster Recovery Using AWS

DR Infrastructure & Services: Given the underprovisioning Software Licenses: One of the easily overlooked but
of hardware based on an assumption that not all customers significant cost savings factors when using AWS as target
will require failover at the same time, DRaaS providers infrastructure and an appropriate replication tool for DR is
are able to offer lower costs for standby machines as eliminating the need to purchase duplicate software licenses
compared with an on-premises DR implementation. for your standby DR site. The reason for this is that when an
Nonetheless, a DRaaS provider’s ability to underprovision appropriate replication technology is used, there’s no longer
servers effectively is negligible compared to the economy a need to maintain a duplicate standby system with standby
of scale provided by the cloud, and is therefore a more licenses (of an Oracle DB, for example).
costly option. In addition, there may also be added costs
associated with third-party application licenses, depending Instead, the DR solution keeps servers continuously in sync
on the replication method used. in your preferred AWS region, without running any licensed
OS or application. In the event of a disaster or a DR test,
Management & Monitoring: Organizations rely on their you can launch your servers within minutes, and only then
DRaaS provider to handle most of the management and require the third-party OS and application licenses. In other
monitoring of their DR site. While they do not have to pay words, you get the resilience of a highly available system
for additional IT staff, they do have to pay their DRaaS with near-zero RPOs and RTOs, at the cost of a cold standby
provider. Such costs differ among the various vendors. solution.

Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery DR Infrastructure & Services: Whereas traditional enterprise-

grade DR solutions require duplicate compute and storage
A revolution in disaster recovery came with the advancement infrastructure provisioned in the DR site, cloud-based DR
of cloud technology and the enormous growth of public solutions allow you to pay for fully provisioned workloads
cloud infrastructure, which allows you to pay only for the only in the event of an actual disaster, thereby dramatically
resources you use. In parallel, replication technologies cutting DR infrastructure costs.
evolved to leverage cloud infrastructure cost-effectively,
forming a “perfect marriage” between DR and the cloud. Management & Monitoring: Cloud-based DR solutions
leverage the elasticity of the cloud and provide much better
As a result, organizations can now achieve enterprise-grade DR automation than traditional solutions, which means
DR at a dramatically lower cost than was previously possible. fewer IT resources are required to launch or maintain
There are numerous cloud-based DR technology solution the service. Automated machine conversion technologies
vendors. Top-of-the-line solutions provide enterprise- ensure that the heavy lifting typically involved in converting
grade recovery objectives, and agnostic protection for any machines from one infrastructure to another is rapid and
application, workload, or database, without any impact simplified. As a result, machines can boot natively into AWS,
on your source servers. When evaluating a DR solution, even if they originated from a dissimilar infrastructure.
make sure to ask the right questions about the software
capabilities and limitations, based on your environment Lastly, a DR solution that offers automated orchestration of
details and recovery objectives. the application stacks, which can be performed in advance
during the implementation stage, can eliminate the need for
Hardware: When using AWS as target DR infrastructure, no time-consuming, manual network configurations during a
hardware is needed, and you only pay for your cloud DR disaster.
site when required, such as during a disaster or DR drill.
This means no CapEx investment or unnecessary duplicate
provisioning of resources.

White Paper | 3 ©2019 CloudEndure Ltd. All Rights Reserved www.cloudendure.com

Affordable Enterprise-Grade Disaster Recovery Using AWS

Additional Benefits of Disaster right technology, however, will enable you to achieve the
enterprise-grade resilience and performance of on-premises
Recovery Into AWS and DRaaS solutions, with the dramatic cost reduction of
While cloud-based disaster recovery into AWS is clearly the
leveraging the cloud for DR.
least expensive approach, you may be wondering whether
this “cheaper” option is as effective and enterprise-grade as
an on-premises or DRaaS solution. The answer is yes. Not Below, we address some of the concerns you may have
only does cloud-based DR technology provide top-of-the- specific to cloud-based DR into AWS, as well as questions
line DR, but it provides capabilities not available with other to consider when evaluating the right DR solution for your
DR strategies, including: enterprise.

• Easy Testability — Quickly spin up machines for your periodic What RPO can I achieve when using AWS to protect my
DR drills without disrupting your source environment. workloads? How much data loss might I experience
during a disaster?
• Self-Service DR — Configure your AWS environment,
When using continuous block-level replication DR
replicate your servers, and perform DR drills whenever you
technologies, you should expect near-zero RPO (normally
want. Deployment is easy, and access to cloud resources is
seconds or less), depending on the latency and network
instantaneous.
quality between your source servers and target AWS region.
• Flexibility Between Infrastructures — Protect physical,
virtual, or cloud-based source machines by replicating What RTO can I achieve when using AWS as target
them into a DR site in any AWS Region.
infrastructure? How long will it take me to failover
into AWS during a disaster?
FAQs About Cloud-Based Disaster Two key capabilities that enable quick recovery into AWS are:
Recovery Into AWS 1) automated machine conversion of your source servers into
For some enterprises, moving DR to the public cloud may AWS instances, and 2) automated large-scale DR orchestration.
seem like a radical move. However, in recent years, more Cloud-based DR technologies that include these two
and more enterprises, government entities, hospitals, and capabilities deliver recovery times of minutes and can launch
flagship academic institutions have done so. AWS and all of your target machines in parallel, on a mass scale.
other leading public clouds offer enterprise-grade security,
compliance, and data integrity. As such, many organizations Can AWS support my physical and virtual machines?
have declared cloud-first initiatives to outsource What about legacy applications?
infrastructure to the public cloud wherever possible, with A cloud-based DR solution must perform replication at
DR being one of the first candidates. the OS level (rather than hypervisor or SAN level) in order
to support recovery of any type of infrastructure into AWS,
The technology you choose for your cloud-based DR including physical, any type of virtual hypervisor, cloud-
solution can vary greatly from one vendor to another. Some based, and colocated servers. When the replication is
DR solutions cannot guarantee consistency or support all of conducted at the block level, any file system or application
your applications, which would impact your implementation is transparently supported. Common workloads include the
success rate. Other technologies may impact your server suite of databases and applications from vendors such as
performance or deliver inadequate RPOs or RTOs. The Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft.

Features & Benefits of 3 Disaster Recovery Strategies

On-Premises DRaaS Cloud-Based

Enterprise-Grade

Total Cost of Ownership High Medium Low

Automated Deployment & Maintenance

Easy Testability

Easy Scalability

Self-Service DR

Flexibility Between Infrastructures

Software-Defined DR Site

White Paper | 4 ©2019 CloudEndure Ltd. All Rights Reserved www.cloudendure.com

Affordable Enterprise-Grade Disaster Recovery Using AWS

Is it possible to use AWS for disaster recovery without What if my servers experience a virus, hacker, or
moving my primary workloads to AWS? ransomware attack that compromises my data, or
Absolutely. When you use AWS as DR target infrastructure, a database corruption that requires me to recover
you simply have a dormant copy of your workloads as AWS to a previous point in time. Is point-in-time recovery
instances, which can then be fully launched whenever you possible?
choose to do so. You can continue to use any infrastructure Yes. With the appropriate cloud-based DR solution, you can
you choose for your production environment, as long as recover back to previous consistent points in time.
your DR solution performs block-level replication.

Isn’t putting my DR in the cloud a security risk?

As long as your DR solution uses proper data-at-rest and data-
in-transit encryption, your data is secure. If desired, request
that your DR solution allow you to be in control of the data
path for the replication traffic over your private networks.
Ask AWS about any specific questions you might have about
meeting the regulatory compliance requirements applicable
to your business.

Won’t setting up DR in AWS disrupt my source system?

This entirely depends on the DR solution. Some cloud-
based DR solutions require rebooting your system, or taking
frequent snapshots, and may impact system performance
or require local storage at the expense of your primary
applications; others are designed to be non-intrusive.

How can I conduct DR drills with a cloud-based DR

solution?
DR drills are much easier when using the cloud as a target.
On-premises and DRaaS DR strategies require you to ensure
that the resources needed for the drill are provisioned and
paid for in advance, and in some cases require disrupting
source applications to avoid network conflicts.

However, when using AWS as a DR target, you can simply

request the resources when needed, and only pay for them
upon use. Furthermore, you can spin up your target AWS
machines in complete isolation, thereby performing DR drills
without any impact or conflict with your source applications.

If I run my DR servers in AWS, how time-consuming and

costly will the failback into my primary infrastructure
be, once the disaster is over?
With some solutions, this can be a cumbersome manual
process of setting up your source servers and applications
from scratch, moving the data, and then keeping it in sync
until the point of failback. Other solutions allow you to simply
reverse the replication directly and keep the data in real-
time sync back to your primary site within minutes, once the
disaster is over and you’re ready for failback.

White Paper | 5 ©2019 CloudEndure Ltd. All Rights Reserved www.cloudendure.com

Affordable Enterprise-Grade Disaster Recovery Using AWS

Success Story: AWS Disaster Recovery

“We’re moving forward with replication on a client-by- and applications based on Microsoft platforms such as
client basis. As we phase out clients, we decommission .NET, SQL Server, and IIS. They used CloudEndure Disaster
Recovery to replicate their environment to AWS, and tested
their replicas in the secondary facility. When we’ve
networking, failover, and automation. CGS saw that they
replicated all of the clients in AWS with CloudEndure, we would be able to decommission their secondary data center
can start to decommission the facility and realize the and realize immediate disaster recovery cost savings of 50%
cost savings we are looking for.” or more by leveraging the scalability of AWS. In addition,
they would achieve enterprise-grade business continuity
Michael Brandi through CloudEndure’s automated cloud orchestration
Vice President of the Technology Solutions Division at CGS
and machine conversion, continuous data replication, and
automated failback.
The Challenge
As their business scaled up, CGS had to keep buying Result
duplicate hardware, software, and connectivity resources Launching CloudEndure Disaster Recovery into AWS means
for their secondary data center – all of which might never that CGS has an on-demand disaster recovery solution that
actually be used. Given that they needed duplicate resources eliminates the need for duplicate resources. In addition to
for hundreds of mission-critical servers, this became a very annual cost savings, CGS and their customers also benefit
expensive project. from sub-second RPOs for all workloads, including complex
ERP applications, and a significant reduction in recovery
Solution Testing time, with no performance impact.
CGS tested their enterprise resource planning (ERP)
environment, which included large, write-intensive databases

Business as Usual. Always.

CloudEndure, an AWS company, accelerates the journey to CloudEndure Migration simplifies, expedites, and automates
the AWS cloud with solutions that provide business continuity large-scale migrations from physical, virtual, and cloud-based
during the migration process and additional protection once infrastructure to AWS. CloudEndure Disaster Recovery protects
there. Enterprises use CloudEndure to replicate their most against downtime and data loss from any threat, including
critical databases, including Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, ransomware and server corruption. With CloudEndure it’s
and MySQL, as well as enterprise applications such as SAP. business as usual, always.

For more information about CloudEndure’s Disaster Recovery and Migration solutions:
CONTACT US
www.cloudendure.com | [email protected]

White Paper | 6 ©2019 CloudEndure Ltd. All Rights Reserved www.cloudendure.com