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April 2024
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Sunstone Hotel Investors Facilitates Business Continuity with AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery

With the help of AWS Partner RedNight Consulting, Sunstone Hotel Investors modernized its operations by migrating to AWS and crafting a robust disaster recovery plan.

Benefits

Reduces

hardware costs

Facilitates

business continuity

Prevents

data loss

Supports

business growth

Overview

Supported by AWS Partner RedNight Consulting, Sunstone Hotel Investors modernized its operations by migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and crafting a disaster recovery plan. With a portfolio of 14 hotels, the hotel investment group faced challenges with its outdated data center infrastructure, leading to inefficiencies and scalability issues. Sunstone Hotel Investors worked with RedNight Consulting to migrate 15 servers to the cloud and implement AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery to facilitate business continuity. The company can now operate more efficiently and adapt swiftly to changing business needs while protecting against data loss.
Opened door of hotel room with key in the lock

About Sunstone Hotel Investor

Based in Aliso Viejo, California, Sunstone Hotel Investors manages a portfolio of 14 hotels across the United States.

Opportunity | Transforming Investment Operations with Modern Technology

Managing a hotel involves detailed revenue management, strategic marketing, and consistent service improvement. Add multiple properties to the mix, and operations become much more complex. Companies that invest in hotel properties need modern technology to handle these challenges while maintaining high-quality service. To enhance its operational efficiency, Sunstone Hotel Investors decided to modernize.

The investment group wanted help migrating to AWS and implementing a disaster recovery plan to protect its data. So it turned to AWS Advanced Partner RedNight Consulting, which specializes in cloud-based solutions and disaster recovery planning. Together, the companies developed a comprehensive strategy for migrating and securing the IT infrastructure of Sunstone Hotel Investors.

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Using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, I know that the system will work the second I turn it on.

Mike Toggenburger

IT Director, Sunstone Hotel Investors

Implementing AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery for Business Continuity

From October to December 2022, Sunstone Hotel Investors and RedNight Consulting migrated 15 servers and main network and communications system from the on-premises data center to AWS. This involved transferring all the company’s data, business analysis tools, and key accounting and enterprise-resource-planning software. RedNight Consulting also encouraged Sunstone Hotel Investors to adopt Amazon WorkSpaces—which are fully managed, secure, reliable virtual desktop solutions—to facilitate remote access.

As the migration progressed, Sunstone Hotel Investors realized that it had never properly used disaster recovery plans and systems. Disaster recovery is crucial for business continuity, helping to protect against data loss if the system goes down. As a public company, Sunstone Hotel Investors needed reliable systems with advanced security features, especially for its accounting software and remote access capabilities.

After the migration, Sunstone Hotel Investors adopted AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS), which minimizes downtime and data loss with fast, reliable recovery of on-premises and cloud-based applications. To facilitate this, the company runs this service using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, which provide secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload.

Each Amazon EC2 instance runs the AWS DRS agent for replication, actively mirroring changes from the live servers to a backup location across the country. This backup hub maintains up to 7 days of versioned snapshots of the servers, facilitating immediate disaster recovery activation. Using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery—along with the security features built in AWS services—Sunstone Hotel Investors can access data consistently and prevent operational disruptions.

“We are much more comfortable with the level of security that we have using Amazon WorkSpaces compared with other environments we’ve been in, which were mainly onsite data centers,” says Toggenburger.

By migrating to AWS and avoiding the need for hardware and software refreshes in its data center, the company saved around $250,000 up front, plus $5,000 dollars monthly. The company feels confident knowing that it has implemented robust disaster recovery capabilities while saving resources.

Sunstone Hotel Investors has reinvested the time and resources saved from migrating to AWS to develop a business intelligence dashboard for near real-time data access. The system has enhanced its core competency in data management and reporting, facilitating data-driven decision-making. This positions the company for fast growth compared to competitors.