Using AWS for disaster recovery of on-premises applications

The following section outlines the benefits of using AWS for disaster recovery, explores various AWS disaster recovery solutions, and explains how to assess and implement a disaster recovery solution.

Benefits of using AWS for disaster recovery

Using AWS for disaster recovery offers services that have the following benefits:

• Elasticity – Disaster recovery-related AWS services are normally billed per usage. This provides the flexibility to utilize AWS as a disaster recovery site by paying only for the resources used, rather than committing to a long-term contract or set number of servers.

• TCO – AWS offers a lower TCO than traditional, non-cloud solutions. AWS-based disaster recovery uses minimal resources in customers’ AWS accounts – primarily low-cost storage for replicating data. Customers are billed only for fully provisioned servers when launched at the time of recovery or drill.

• RTO and RPO – Ability to achieve RTOs of minutes by launching the disaster recovery site on demand and RPOs of seconds using continuous data replication.

• Source infrastructure support – Supports most applications running on x86 architecture (including physical and virtual).

• Hypervisor support – Supports any hypervisor (including physical servers, when there is no hypervisor at all).

• Wide OS support – AWS supports a large variety of Linux distributions and Windows versions.

• Environment isolation – Ability to create the disaster recovery site in an isolated environment so that drills do not impact the source site.

• Application support – Atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability (ACID)-compliant applications are supported, including any ACID-compliant database, such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, and SAP HANA.

• Automation – Ability to fully automate all of the disaster recovery-related operations.

• Ease of use – Ability to add the disaster recovery capabilities to working applications with no need for redesign or re-architecture work.