The News: At re:Invent 2023, Amazon Web Services (AWS) made a number of announcements related to disaster recovery (DR) testing and failback and the availability of AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. Additional detail is available from AWS.
AWS Enhances Disaster Recovery with Automated Testing and Validation
Analyst Take: Effective disaster recovery (DR) plans are crucial to ensuring business continuity, protecting critical data, and minimizing IT service downtime, as all of these factors can have devastating financial and reputational repercussions. At the same time, the growing frequency and sophistication of cyberattacks make businesses more vulnerable to data breaches and IT service disruptions.
The problem is that cyberattacks are unpredictable, complicated, and difficult to recover from. At the same time, enterprises are adopting hybrid cloud environments, adding further complexities by facilitating the creation of an expansive web of interconnected components and dependencies as well as data and application sprawl. This complexity makes DR plans more difficult to design and implement and increases the likelihood of errors or unexpected issues during a disaster.
For these reasons, regulatory and business requirements are becoming stricter around data protection and business continuity. IT operations teams must be able to demonstrate not only that they have the ability to recover but also how long recovery will take and how much data will be lost. Validating recoverability on a regular basis and at scale becomes crucial. By identifying potential weaknesses and refining recovery processes, DR validation helps organizations to position their operations and data for resiliency against malicious actors and a variety of other potential incidents, such as natural disasters.
AWS made two announcements at re:Invent 2023 aimed at addressing this challenge:
- The addition of automated restore testing capabilities to AWS Backup. The customer configures a restore testing plan, which is then executed automatically. Reporting on the completion status is also available for documentation and compliance purposes.
- The ability to automate validations of EC2 instances and network connectivity as well as the availability of free storage space for recovery and testing exercises with the AWS DRS.
Faster time to recovery, streamlined recovery testing, and a reduced chance of human error are among the benefits for IT operations. Though AWS still has work to do when it comes to offering comprehensive, enterprise-grade data protection services, these announcements, especially when combined with the support for failback operations for Amazon EFS Replication and support for the AWS GovCloud (US) Region with AWS DRS, are steps forward that address an important piece of the cyber-resiliency puzzle.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Krista Case is Research Director, Cybersecurity & Resilience at The Futurum Group. She brings approximately 15 years of experience providing research and advisory services and creating thought leadership content. Her vantage point spans technology and vendor portfolio developments; customer buying behavior trends; and vendor ecosystems, go-to-market positioning, and business models. Her work has appeared in major publications including eWeek, TechTarget and The Register.
Prior to joining The Futurum Group, Krista led the data protection practice for Evaluator Group and the data center practice of analyst firm Technology Business Research. She also created articles, product analyses, and blogs on all things storage and data protection and management for analyst firm Storage Switzerland and led market intelligence initiatives for media company TechTarget.
