AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery is a tool in the Data Backup category of a tech stack. It minimizes downtime and data loss with fast, reliable recovery of on-premises and cloud-based applications. AWS DRS reduces costs by removing the need for idle recovery site infrastructure and leveraging affordable storage, minimal compute, and point-in-time recovery. AWS DRS is built on Cloud Endure Disaster Recovery (CEDR), which was acquired by Amazon and now recommended as the primary DR solution for on-premises and cloud-based applications.
AWS DRS continuously replicates the block storage volumes of physical, virtual, and cloud servers. This helps to achieve RPOs of seconds and RTOs of minutes after a disaster. This enables organizations to quickly recover from disasters like hardware or software failures in their data centers, ransomware attacks, and other unexpected occurrences.
DRS can be used to provide failover protection for all types of EC2 instances. This includes standard instances, elastic instances, bare metal, and vSphere-based virtual machines. It also supports a wide variety of applications and databases including Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, SAP, VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, and other enterprise applications.
It provides a unified view of recovery times across all workloads with a single platform to manage the entire lifecycle of the recovery process. Its easy-to-use SaaS solution simplifies disaster recovery planning and deployment. It also enables a rapid recovery for critical workloads with RPOs of seconds and supports flexible recovery plans for the most demanding business requirements.
Unlike traditional on-premises disaster recovery solutions that require dedicated infrastructure to be available for failover, AWS DRS utilizes an automated approach for recovering and testing systems. This minimizes costs and improves availability, while enabling continuous recovery for critical workloads with RPOs as low as seconds.
With AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, a customer can quickly recover all of their on-premises and cloud-based applications with the click of a button. The service can also be used to test the resilience of applications in the event of a disaster, by automatically launching test instances in AWS. It is possible to monitor these test instances and determine whether any changes have been made, or if the application is functioning properly.
AWS DRS can be accessed over private connections instead of over public internet, which reduces security risks and optimizes bandwidth usage. Additionally, DRS uses Amazon Glacier to store a copy of data to be retrieved at a later date, which further protects the data from unintended access or deletion. This provides a high level of security for mission-critical applications, and is ideal for customers that need to comply with regulatory compliance. AWS DRS also supports a range of Amazon Web Services tools to monitor the status of recovery processes and automate recovery, including Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Data Pipeline, and Amazon Web Service Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). It also supports integrations with third-party data management and orchestration platforms such as Microsoft System Center Operations Manager. In addition, AWS DRS offers a free tier for qualifying use cases and makes it simple to upgrade to higher usage tiers as needs evolve.