When To Choose AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) is the recommended service for disaster recovery to AWS. It provides similar capabilities as CloudEndure Disaster Recovery, and is operated from the AWS Management Console. This enables seamless integration between AWS DRS and other AWS services, such as AWS CloudTrail, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), and Amazon CloudWatch.

With AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, you can recover your applications on AWS from physical infrastructure, VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, and cloud infrastructure. You can also use AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery to recover Amazon EC2 instances in a different AWS Region.

You can use AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery to recover all of your applications and databases that run on supported Windows and Linux operating system versions.

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery currently supports the following AWS Regions: US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), and Europe (London). Please refer to the AWS Regional Services List for the most up-to-date information on Region support.

We recommend using CloudEndure Disaster Recovery only if you require one or more of the following capabilities:

Replication to an AWS Region not yet supported by AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery
Replication of an operating system not yet supported by AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery
Replication of more than 300 servers that need to recover to the same AWS Region and AWS account
HIPAA or ISO compliance
Replication and recovery into AWS Outposts

Get started with AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery »

Detailed comparison of CloudEndure Disaster Recovery and AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery

Capability	CloudEndure Disaster Recovery	AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS)
Operating system (OS) support	Common operating systems are supported Detailed list available in the documentation	Common operating systems are supported Detailed list available in the documentation AWS DRS does not currently support all of the operating systems supported by CloudEndure Disaster Recovery
Recovery Region support	Most AWS commercial Regions plus GovCloud and China Regions Detailed information on Region support available on AWS Regional Services List	Currently supports 9 AWS commerical Regions Does not currently support GovCloud or China Regions Detailed information on Region support available on AWS Regional Services List
Console and APIs	Not part of AWS Management Console Not standard AWS APIs, SDK, and CLI	Part of AWS Management Console Standard AWS APIs, SDK, and CLI
AWS resource management	Legacy projects Legacy blueprints that are not necessarily up to date with Amazon EC2	Standard AWS mechanism (tags or accounts) Launch settings and standard Amazon EC2 launch templates (instead of blueprints)
User management and monitoring	Standalone user management 3 available pre-set, non-configurable user profiles Selected 52 events in legacy format No access to metrics	Standard AWS user management mechanism (IAM). IAM provides granular, configurable authorization for specific APIs and AWS DRS resources Standard AWS audit mechanism (AWS CloudTrail) with full coverage Standard AWS metrics and events mechanism (Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon EventBridge)
Consumption model	Hourly metering via AWS Marketplace subscription that requires an additional EULA	Hourly metering via standard AWS billing and EULA
Pricing	Hourly rate for replication per source server is $0.028 See pricing information for details	Hourly rate for replication per source server is $0.028 See pricing information for details
Control plane	Control plane for all supported commercial Regions and GovCloud is hosted in US East (N. Virginia) Control plane for China Region is hosted in China (Beijing)	Control plane is hosted in recovery Region Higher availability due to no cross-Region dependencies
Public internet access	Required for connection between agents, replication servers, and console Data must go through public internet	Not required Supports AWS PrivateLink and AWS Direct Connect for replication and failback Provides option to replicate not through public internet, which is a significant security benefit
Temporary IAM credentials for agent installation	No	Yes
Non-disruptive failback testing	No To test failback, you need to stop replication of the source server	Yes While failing back to a test machine (not the original source server), replication of the source server continues. This allows failback drills without impacting recovery point objective (RPO).
AWS Region to Region replication and recovery	Yes	Yes
AWS Region to Region failback	Yes	Yes, but currently requires manual steps
Large-scale failback automation	Yes	Yes
Separate accounts for staging and launching (Required for deployments with more than 300 servers per AWS account per target Region)	Yes	No
No rescan on reboot	Supported for Windows only	Supported for Windows and Linux
In scope for the following compliance programs	GDPR, HIPAA, and ISO For more details, see the AWS compliance page No plans for additional programs	GDPR For more details, see the AWS compliance page
Pause/resume replication	Yes	No
Stop replication	Yes	Requires uninstalling the AWS DRS agent
Start replication	Yes	Requires reinstalling the AWS DRS agent
AWS Region to Region VPC stack creation	Yes	No
Auto-detection of added disks	Yes	No
Support for AWS Outposts	Yes	No
Recovery plans	Yes	See this blog post for instructions