AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery

Short Summary

Digital transformation increases organizational dependence on IT services, raising the business impact of accidental errors, natural disasters, and cyber incidents. As a result, business continuity planning becomes essential, with data resilience solutions and disaster recovery (DR) services needing to work across modern hybrid, multi-cloud environments. Data is positioned as the enterprise’s most critical asset, threatened by malware, device or system failures, and especially ransomware, which has heightened the urgency of resilient backup and recovery. Post–COVID-19 working changes also expand risk as access needs extend beyond traditional office boundaries, requiring both data and services to be available wherever and whenever needed.

Traditional on-premises backup methods relied on copying data to tape or disk and physically moving media offsite, introducing delays and transfer risks. In hybrid multi-cloud environments, customers may wrongly assume cloud usage eliminates resilience concerns; instead, providers ensure service resilience while tenants remain responsible for their own data resilience and must actively use cloud capabilities to meet continuity objectives. Cloud platforms offer resilient storage across multiple secure, geographically distributed datacenters and can provide failover environments, though replicating workloads from dissimilar infrastructure requires machine conversion.

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS), announced in November 2021, is presented as AWS’s recommended DR service for recovery to AWS. It continuously replicates source servers (physical, virtual, or cloud) to an AWS account with minimal performance impact, using low-cost storage and minimal compute until recovery is required. Block-level replication preserves disk write order, while point-in-time recovery relies on Amazon EBS snapshots in a staging area, enabling crash-consistent recovery for databases such as MS SQL, Oracle, and SAP HANA. During failover, AWS DRS automates orchestration and proprietary machine conversion so recovered workloads run natively in AWS, and it supports non-disruptive DR testing and failback. Security and compliance capabilities integrate with IAM, MFA, TLS, encryption with customer-controlled KMS keys, and broad compliance attestations, while limitations include AWS-only recovery storage, no SaaS protection, and reliance on partners for fully managed DRaaS.

Interesting Facts

• Business continuity planning is an essential element of digital transformation due to increased dependence on IT services.
• Ransomware attacks have emphasized the need for data resilience because criminals demand payment to restore access to business-critical data.
• AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery was announced in November 2021.
• AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery continuously replicates customer source servers to the customer’s AWS account with minimal compute resources for ongoing replication.
• AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery supports replication of physical, virtual, and cloud-based source servers across a wide variety of hypervisors and operating systems.
• Block-level replication maintains write order among all disks within the same source server.
• Point-in-time snapshots are taken using Amazon EBS snapshots of data held within a staging area.
• AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery supports crash-consistent recovery points for database applications including MS SQL, Oracle, and SAP HANA.
• AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery is available in 21 AWS Regions worldwide.
• AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery does not provide coverage of SaaS services and only supports AWS as the storage/DR environment.

Notable Quotes

• “Data is the most important business asset of the modern enterprise and needs to be protected against unwanted events such as malware as well as physical or logical damage to the storage devices or the IT installation.”
• “The service provider is responsible for the resilience of the service that they provide but the tenant is responsible for the resilience of their data.”
• “The customer must take care to use the capabilities provided by the cloud service to achieve their business continuity objectives.”
• “The cloud provides an ideal location for backed-up data since major cloud services are delivered from highly secured datacentres in multiple geographic locations.”
• “Today’s e-commerce, financial services, and critical infrastructure demand continuous availability where even seconds of downtime could have a severe business impact.”
• “This always on architecture depends upon continuous data replication to ensure business continuity when individual elements fail.”
• “AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery… enables organizations to minimize downtime and data loss with fast, reliable recovery of on-premises and cloud-based applications.”
• “When a failover is initiated, AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery executes an automated machine conversion and orchestration process that allows applications and databases to run natively in AWS.”
• “The service also supports non-disruptive testing to confirm that protection is operational and complete.”
• “A key benefit of AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery is that it provides organizations with a disaster recovery solution without the need for physical backups and replicated hardware.”