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AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery is a service that provides recovery of on-premises and cloud-based applications to AWS.
The DR service is part of AWS’ storage portfolio and designed to minimize downtime and data loss.
See below to learn all about AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery:
The cloud disaster recovery market
The global cloud-based data backup and recovery market was estimated to be valued at $9.69 billion in 2021. It’s expected to maintain a CAGR of 9.8% from 2021 to 2030, reaching an estimated value of $22.22 billion by the end of it.
Some of AWS’s leading competitors in the global market include: MozyPro Cloud Backup; SolarWinds Backup; Carbonite; Sonian; ConnectWise Automate; and Rapid Recovery.
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery key features
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery works by minimizing the downtime and data loss windows through a seamless and reliable data recovery process from on-premises and cloud-based backups.
“AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) provides scalable, cost-effective recovery of applications to AWS. One of the benefits is that you only pay for what you use,” says Jack Tilson, Solutions Architect at AWS.
“When considering DR solutions, it’s important to consider the target recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) for the workloads you want to protect. Not all workloads are created equal. … With AWS DRS, it’s possible to achieve an RPO of seconds and an RTO of minutes.”
AWS Elastic DR works directly on the source servers, performing regular data replication for the backup process.
It maintains the readiness and availability of the replicated data during normal operations, but the recovery process can be initiated within minutes, restoring some or all of the data from a server or a set point in time.
Some of AWS Elastic DR’s key features include:
- Reserves DR sites and computing power only when needed
- Non-disruptive tests for recovery performed in the background
- Fast recovery of applications to any point in time
- Flexible access to AWS servers for replications and backups
- On-premises to AWS servers recovery operations
- Perform backups and recovery cross AWS regional servers
- Ability to run cloud-based applications natively on AWS cloud
- Optimizes for data availability
- Offers multiple point-in-time recovery options
- Streamlines recovery for cloud-based and on-premises applications
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery use cases
The following case studies highlight how organizations in different industries are using AWS Elastic DR:
Southeast Iowa Regional Medical Center
The Southeast Iowa Regional Medical Center is a comprehensive health care facility.
Looking to improve their data management and HER system’s DR capabilities, the medical center turned to Healthcare Triangle, which assists health care facilities to scale their digital infrastructure.
Upon recommending AWS Elastic DR, the Iowa hospital set up a secondary site for their data on AWS and used automated features.
“Using AWS, we were able to offload the entire solution without anyone outside of our team knowing what was going on. There was no impact on database times and no impact on internet connectivity,” says Shane Tapper, systems executive of informatics, Southeast Iowa Regional Medical Center.
“Point-in-time recovery was a nice benefit when we first looked at the product, but it’s starting to become a requirement given how large a target health care now is.”
Switching to AWS Elastic DR, Southeast Iowa Regional Medical Center was able to improve recovery time by 67% and reliably replicate and back up 14 TB of critical operations data.
Tyler Technologies
Tyler Technologies is a U.S.-based software company that works predominantly with the public sector.
Working in software means that Tyler Technologies is, at any time, responsible for large amounts of data belonging to the public sector.
With their on-premises DR solution unable to keep up with the company’s expansion, they decided to start using AWS Elastic DR for their data recovery needs.
“It was exponentially faster than every other solution that we looked at, which would build and then restore data elements after an event. Although those solutions were an option, the tradeoff was definitely speed,” says Christopher Armstrong, director of information security, Tyler Technologies.
“We are confident in our recoverability. Using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery helps us to sleep better at night.”
By utilizing AWS Elastic DR, Tyler Technologies was able to perform recovery 12x faster, protect over 4,000 virtual machines, and effectively scale their DR infrastructure to correlate with business growth.
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery Differentiators
AWS Elastic DR can stand out in the disaster recovery market for several reasons:
Regional availability
AWS Elastic DR allows users to recover data quickly from servers based all around the world: North America, Africa, Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, and South America.
Operating in any of these locations, AWS Elastic DR can be used to recover all systems, databases, and applications that run on Windows or Linux. It also enables users to recover applications from physical infrastructure on AWS, VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and standard cloud infrastructure.
Non-disruptive fail-back testing
AWS Elastic DR supports non-disruptive fail-back testing, allowing users to validate their system’s capacity in the event of a server failure and allocate the needed resources toward it.
Using this capability, replication of databases and applications doesn’t get interrupted, and the entirety of the test is conducted on a separate testing machine.
No public internet access
AWS Elastic DR doesn’t require a constant connection to a public internet network. It can function at full capacity using the AWS PrivateLink for connecting to fail-back testing servers and performing DR replications.
This enables users to keep databases and applications off public internet connections, reducing security risks and optimizing bandwidth usage.
Process monitoring and management
Being connected to the AWS ecosystem of solutions, AWS Elastic DR’s processes can be managed through identity access management (IAM), providing configurable and granular authorization control for APIs.
Additionally, standard AWS events and metrics can be monitored and tracked through Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon EventBridge with no compatibility issues.
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery user reviews
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery receives mostly positive reviews from users at review sites:
TrustRadius: 9 out of 10
Gartner Peer Insights: 4.6 out of 5
SourceForge: 4.8 out of 5
Conclusions
All in all, AWS Elastic DR is one a top DR solutions in the market, as it offers automated DR that drastically reduces the downtime organizations may face during data-related incidents. It offers reliable and fast recovery on cloud-based and on-premises databases and applications. The solution is offered under a pay-as-you-go model, with minimal computing and on-premises storage resources required.
