JetSweep: Helping customers build a business continuity strategy for Microsoft workloads with Disaster Recovery as a Service

“With the current geopolitical climate, it’s tough out there, and risks that impact continuity of operations are widespread. Ransomware, supply chain issues, cyberhacking, natural disasters, and human mistakes are just a few of the challenges organizations are facing.”

This is what Brian MacDonald, a vice president at JetSweep, shared with me in a recent conversation about disaster recovery (DR). Brian is a cloud infrastructure and DR subject matter expert. He and his team at JetSweep help customers with their DR needs by providing a solution called Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS).

JetSweep is an Advanced AWS Consulting Partner that delivers cloud and managed services to AWS customers. The JetSweep team helps our customers rework, build, and optimize their environments for maximal performance to improve productivity and spur innovation. One of their areas of expertise is disaster recovery and resiliency planning.

In this blog post, I share the conversation I had with Brian about building a business continuity strategy for Microsoft workloads on AWS. Let’s get started.

Q. What challenges do you see customers experiencing with disaster recovery for Microsoft workloads?

Most businesses are struggling to establish business continuity plans that meet all of their business requirements and desired outcomes. Customers that rely on traditional on-premises disaster recovery solutions deal with additional challenges, such as:

• The high cost of duplicate infrastructure, operating systems, and third-party licenses required to run workloads in disaster recovery site; or
• Their current disaster recovery solution takes too long to recover workloads; or
• Different disaster recovery solutions are needed for different applications.

Q. So, how is your team helping to overcome these challenges for customers?

We are offering Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) which provides customers with comprehensive DR support such as implementing the DR solutions, providing maintenance and management, and providing 24/7 support in the event of a failover. Our customers often tell us they have better peace of mind knowing that they have experts on their side to help them navigate potential threats.

When customers engage us for their DR requirements, discussing the intended disaster recovery objectives, such as RPO and RTO, is the first step. Once the guardrails are set, our team can tailor and design a business continuity plan that fits a customer’s compliance and continuity plan. In our service offering, it usually is made up of five phases. Let me share a diagram that depicts those phases and explain the activities in each phase in more detail.

1. Initial Assessment – For each DRaaS customer, we perform an initial assessment to go through their workloads, discuss their needs, and define goals. Our team is often able to help customers find AWS funding for their assessments. We discuss what workloads are important, what factors need to be incorporated into the plan, and who should be directly involved or notified.
2. Solution Design – We develop a solution based on the data gathered during our initial assessment phase. We also provide recommendations for AWS services and solutions and explain how they meet the needs and goals outlined during an assessment.
3. Implementation – When a customer agrees upon our proposed solution design, we can deliver a proof of concept (PoC) to show how our solution actually works. At this stage, we create a tailored runbook based on the customer’s unique requirements. It includes the step-by-step process for recovery directly after a disaster. It also includes elements like the testing scenario, failover scenarios, and roles for employees throughout the recovery process.
4. Testing – We run a test of our solution to ensure that there are no issues during the failover. If issues arise, we jump back to the design stage to reconfigure the solution and rework our recommendations. We also provide guidance to customers on how to run testing or set up quarterly tests with our team.
5. Maintenance & Optimization – Once testing is complete, our customers have the option to sign a managed services agreement. Our team works with managed services customers to continuously improve their business continuity plan and environment to ensure that it is up-to-date and secure.

Q. I like the idea of providing Disaster Recovery as a Service. Which AWS service do you use to implement it?

We are using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) to build business continuity solutions for our customers. AWS DRS minimizes downtime and data loss with fast, reliable recovery of on-premises and cloud-based applications using affordable storage, minimal compute, and point-in-time recovery. It continuously replicates servers to the AWS environment, enabling recovery within minutes from unexpected infrastructure or application outages. It replicates applications and data to a staging area subnet, which uses cost-effective Amazon Elastic Block Store (AWS EBS) storage and minimal Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) compute. It will only spin servers up on AWS with fully provisioned compute and storage during failover or drills. This keeps ongoing costs low.

Another benefit of continuous block-level replication with AWS DRS is that it replicates servers, including the operating system, system state configuration, databases, applications, and files. While applications are replicating to AWS, users can continue to use them without disruption, and AWS DRS continuously copies any changes.

AWS DRS can also recover applications at a previous point in time and launch a copy of your applications in an operational state prior to data corruption or a ransomware event. Last but not least, non-disruptive testing of a DR solution is critical to ensuring frequent and effective validation of that solution. This can be difficult with traditional DR solutions, which can lead to a lack of testing and even a failed recovery during a disaster.

I co-authored a blog post with the AWS team about a scalable way to change configurations between production and DR test configurations and how to fix any configuration problems quickly and effectively. Our article introduced a scripted process that allows for simple, at-scale changes to blueprints, leading to easier and more frequent testing.

Q. Can you tell me what customers are getting out of using AWS DRS to set up disaster recovery for their Microsoft workloads? 

A Microsoft SQL Server is one of the common workloads that our customers usually want to set up for disaster recovery. Conventional disaster recovery techniques for Microsoft SQL Servers necessitate the replication of infrastructure, operating systems, licensing, and other third-party applications, making it a prohibitively expensive IT project for customers.

Amazon Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) offers enterprises a more contemporary method for preserving Microsoft SQL Server environments: cloud-based disaster recovery into AWS. AWS DRS not only leverages the cloud to drastically reduce disaster recovery infrastructure costs, but it also allows for the recovery of Microsoft SQL Server by replicating the operating system and all database, application, and system files running on the computer.

The benefits of implementing disaster recovery solution for Microsoft SQL Server with AWS DRS are:

• Customers don’t have to pay any SQL Server licensing costs until failover occurs.
• Customers can BYOL (bring your own license) or use a LI (license included) instance for SQL Server in the DR region.
• They can use a single DR solution for SQL Server and other workloads.

Q. How does AWS DRS support Windows users and applications running on Windows Server?

Well, DRS supports all Windows versions supported by AWS and supports BYOL Windows servers/desktops using different instance tenancies. DRS is available in the AWS .NET SDK. Any updates to the application are immediately replicated using change-based continuous data replication to AWS. So customers’ applications are ready to be launched for recovery and drills at all times.

Replication status can also be monitored in the AWS Management Console as part of an ongoing operation to ensure that all servers are up-to-date. With the support of the BYOL feature, customers can save significant licensing costs by utilizing existing licenses, which is one of the imperative features of AWS DRS, I would say.

Q. Thanks for explaining how you leveraged AWS DRS in your Disaster Recovery as a Service offering. The next question would be: What advice can you give to customers who want to build a business continuity strategy, and how can your team help them?

We commonly receive two questions when we start a conversation around DR solutions with customers. “Does DR protect us from cyberattacks?” and “Is a DR solution expensive?” To the first question, I always respond that a DR solution will not prevent an attack, but with an efficient DR solution, we can quickly recover from an attack. This is in line with the Recovery pillar of the NIST framework. For the latter question, it depends. We always offer a variety of options so that customers can obtain affordable DR coverage.

Furthermore, a solid business continuity strategy will assist our customers’ organizations in minimizing data loss, enabling remote employee access to systems 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and avoiding costly disruptions. Developing a plan that satisfies all of these objectives necessitates the assistance of an experienced solution architect. Many customers turn to us for assistance in making this happen. Our solution architects have worked with hundreds of customers to establish a cost-effective, efficient business continuity strategy in both on-premises and cloud environments.

When we develop a customer’s strategy, we discuss these key factors:

• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO)
• Communication channels with all teams responsible for DR​​
• Incident response procedure​​
• Action response procedure and verification process​​
• How and when to complete testing

In every customer engagement, we determine dependencies of the various internal and external workloads in play. We also review the current backup and DR strategies in place to find any deficiencies or issues. In collaboration with the customer, we would then determine services that are required for business continuity.

Q. Do you have Disaster Recovery as a Service case studies you want to share with us?

I can share information about one of our customers in the sanitation and disposal industry in the Mid-Atlantic region. Their servers are located in a local data center, and they had been using an expensive disaster recovery system that did not meet expectations. They were looking for a means to lower their disaster recovery costs and reduce their Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs). We were engaged to address their disaster recovery needs, which include various kinds of Microsoft workloads. We first consulted with stakeholders to determine their precise needs before delivering the solution. Then we proceeded with creating a business continuity design based on the full assessment that included full costing options to consider. We closely collaborated with the customer’s technical team and performed all the essential validations and testing during the implementation.

Q. Did your solution address the customer’s requirement to save cost after the implementation?

Yes, it did. We were able to help our customer save up to 45% of their yearly DR spend and reduced RTO to 30 minutes and RPO to 60 seconds.

Q. That’s awesome! Are there any resources where our readers can find more about your expertise solutions, and case studies?

Yes, customers can find Disaster Recovery as a Service offerings in this document. We also have two blog posts. One is about ransomware, why you should care, and how our customers can protect their companies from ransomware attacks. Another post is to understand business continuity basics and learn about our offerings. We have published our solution in the AWS Marketplace for our customers who wish to start a POC quickly. We offer free business continuity review sessions to discuss customers’ business priorities and design an approach to achieve desired outcomes. And as I mentioned earlier, with a great partnership with AWS, we might be able to utilize funding programs, especially if these are net new workloads to AWS.

About the Microsoft workloads on AWS Partner Spotlight series

Please continue to join us in this blog series as we highlight our AWS Partners’ capabilities in migrating and modernizing Microsoft workloads on AWS. As you do, we hope you’ll also ask the question: “What’s my organization’s plan for moving off SQL Server or Windows Server or whatever technology is keeping us from modernizing to better care for our customers?” Let AWS Partners with their specific niche offerings help you assess how your company can get the most out of cloud.

AWS can help you assess how your company can get the most out of cloud. Join the millions of AWS customers that trust us to migrate and modernize their most important applications in the cloud. To learn more on modernizing Windows Server or SQL Server, visit Windows on AWS. Contact us to start your modernization journey today.