AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Building Disaster Recovery Solutions Through Deloitte’s ATADATA Integration with AWS Application Migration Service
By Hemant Ahire, Principal Solutions Architect, WW Migrations/Modernization – AWS
By BJ Patel, Vice President, Product Strategy & Engineering – Deloitte Consulting
By Terry Gates, Manager Pursuit/Sales Support, ATADATA – Deloitte Consulting
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Companies are migrating their IT applications to the cloud with overarching goals that include accelerating digital transformations, driving business value, and improving time to market. These organizations want to transition more workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to gain benefits such as business agility, operational performance, and pay-as-you-go pricing.
Historically, organizations have developed disaster recovery (DR) solutions for their legacy applications driven by recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) metrics. However, many on-premises workloads come with technical constraints such as archaic technology patterns, architectural complexity, and monolithic applications design.
These constraints can result in increased operational burden, manual errors, and higher recovery times for business-critical workloads. There is also a dependency on third-party vendors and managed DR providers, which can result in limited observability and monitoring features.
Data protection needs are one of the top priorities when architecting disaster recovery solutions on AWS. Cloud-first strategies are the new normal now, and these decisions are driven by data classification tiers and RTO/RPO requirements outlined by business and technical stakeholders.
In this post, we will discuss how AWS and Deloitte together address customers’ migration challenges, and explore the business and technology benefits of adopting joint DR solutions. We’ll also cover technical capabilities and features delivered using the integrated ATADATA and AWS Application Migration Service solution offered by AWS and Deloitte.
Deloitte is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and Managed Service Provider (MSP). Through a network of professionals, industry specialists, and an ecosystem of alliances, Deloitte assists clients in turning complex business issues into opportunities for growth, helping organizations transform in the digital era.
Addressing Customers’ Migration Challenges
The collaboration between Deloitte and AWS delivers global cloud transformations and business outcomes to enterprises with speed and scale. Both organizations are customer obsessed and results focused, with more than 1,300 active customers worldwide operating in 20 countries across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC regions.
Companies are transforming with AWS by leveraging unmatched experience, technical capabilities, and proven solutions to drive success at every step of the migration and modernization journey.
Deloitte and AWS offer joint strategic offerings across industry verticals and horizontal technology solutions such as data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to drive impact in the marketplace. These collaborative offerings solve customers’ migration challenges with offerings that help accelerate modernization journeys with future-ready technologies.
Deloitte’s Application Modernization & Migration (AMM) offering helps reduce operational costs and innovates in impactful ways for a sustainable future.
AWS has built a range of cloud-native migration tools such as Application Migration Service to modernize applications during migrations with disaster recovery options. AWS Application Migration Service integrates with AWS Resilience Hub to provide a central place to define, validate, and track the resilience of applications on AWS.
Building Large-Scale Migration Factory Solutions
The joint disaster recovery solution developed with ATADATA and AWS Application Migration Service provides an end-to-end process for customers to exit their data center or other clouds to AWS. Deloitte’s ATADATA team worked diligently with AWS engineers and architects to create the ATAGuard—the latest module within the ATASphere platform that provides DR functionality in conjunction with the AWS cloud.
The ATASphere platform provides the discovery, reporting, migration planning, and migration execution all under a single pane of glass. In post-migration scenarios, custom integration with ATAGuard provides the interface to setup DR environments, a “true soup to nuts” integrated journey to AWS.
The Deloitte and AWS collaboration has long been an impactful relationship benefitting global customers by driving business value. With every joint initiative the companies undertake, their main goal is to produce meaningful business outcomes for customers.
Key examples of these initiatives are Deloitte ATADATA’s integration with AWS Migration Hub, AWS Outposts, and AWS GovCloud (US). Each solution is designed with heavy collaboration between AWS and Deloitte practitioners that directly address a customer’s unique business problem and is then converted into repeatable solutions.
Benefits of the Joint Disaster Recovery Solution
ATAGuard delivers a rapid and cost-effective disaster recovery solution leveraging automation and AWS Application Migration Service. See the logical integration depicted below.
Figure 1 – ATADATA and AWS integration for DR solution.
Typically, customers have challenges maintaining active DR coverage while undergoing transformation to the cloud. Legacy DR solutions are broken by the migration of application stacks to the cloud and resultant changes to interfaces or IP addressing. Reconfiguring conventional DR is time-consuming while the priority transformation is underway.
ATAGuard is a multi-cloud disaster recovery solution that automates the protection and recovery of servers and applications across any combination of physical, virtual, private, and public clouds. Its module delivers a rapid interim DR solution, leaving customers’ data protected while driving the overall transformation program.
ATADATA is integral to this part of the solution, and risk is reduced in case of a DR event as customers are able to focus on transformation efforts using Deloitte’s migration toolset, ATAMotion. This helps customers to realize quick savings while maintaining DR protection.
Following are some key technical benefits, including flexibility and efficiencies gained, when you leverage the integrated ATADATA and AWS Application Migration Service solution:
- Timelines: Plan to maintain DR coverage during transformational relocation of application stacks, interfaces, and IP addressing. Using ATAGuard, customers can develop flexible interim DR coverage as part of their transformation, helping them to avoid uncovered periods.
- Maintain DR while applications are migrated: Legacy DR requires re-pointing of all interfaces, component validation, and a re-test for all. ATAGuard facilitates interim DR coverage for the life of transformation changes or beyond. This reduces re-work of legacy DR systems and maintains protection.
- Testing failover and failback: ATAGuard delivers ease of implementation in parallel with driving cloud transformation efforts on AWS. The flexible ability to test failover and failback in conjunction with other testing boosts DR coverage and eliminates gaps.
Conclusion
Disaster events occur due to natural disasters such as earthquakes or extreme weather conditions, or due to hardware and software failures including cybersecurity incidents. Such disasters pose a threat to your application and infrastructure availability.
Using combination of the right disaster recovery (DR) strategies, services, and tools offered by Deloitte and AWS, companies have the ability to mitigate or eliminate these threats. It’s recommended to have a clear understanding of business requirements for your workloads, and then choose a DR strategy which balances costs with target state solution architecture.
With the integrated DR solution presented in this post, IT organizations can architect DR environments on AWS to mitigate against disasters. The end goal is to ensure detection and mitigation of disasters is done in a timely manner to minimize or completely avoid disruptions to business operations.
ATADATA’s automation and mass-migration scalability eliminates manual migration tasks, enabling teams to focus on right-sizing and modernizing applications and workloads. Deloitte’s ATADATA clients typically realize significant cost and operational savings with a return on investment (ROI) within 12 months.
Take the next step in your cloud transformation journey with ATADATA on AWS.
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Deloitte – AWS Partner Spotlight
Deloitte is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner and MSP. Through a network of professionals, industry specialists, and an ecosystem of alliances, they assist clients in turning complex business issues into opportunities for growth, helping organizations transform in the digital era.