Executive Summary

Target Engineering, a key player in the construction and engineering industry, faced challenges in developing a robust Disaster Recovery (DR) plan for its critical systems. Partnering with Zero&One, they deployed a Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) powered by AWS, achieving groundbreaking improvements. This solution enabled continuous, asynchronous replication, ensuring sub-second Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and reducing Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) to minutes. Not only did it streamline disaster recovery processes and reduce human error, but it also cut compute costs, offering a significant financial advantage. Through Zero&One's DRaaS, Target Engineering significantly enhanced its resilience against IT disasters, ensuring business continuity and operational efficiency.

Customer Challenge

Target Engineering faced significant challenges in upgrading its disaster recovery strategy for the Oracle EBS Production solution. The key difficulties included ensuring reliable data replication from on-premise to AWS Middle East (Bahrain), protecting critical Oracle EBS workloads, meeting stringent Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) requirements, and orchestrating failover and failback processes. Additionally, the company needed to future-proof its disaster recovery environment, integrate backup storage solutions with AWS S3, and maintain seamless connectivity for future deployments. Clear communication about costs and any exclusions or pre-requisites was also crucial to avoid unexpected hurdles in enhancing their disaster recovery capabilities.

Why Zero&One and AWS

Zero&One's partnership with AWS offers SMBs an exceptional opportunity to harness advanced cloud solutions. Our deep expertise in navigating the complexities of cloud infrastructure, coupled with AWS's scalable and robust platform, enables us to deliver cost-effective, agile, and secure solutions tailored to the unique needs of SMBs. By leveraging AWS's extensive suite of services, Zero&One empowers SMBs to enhance their operational efficiency, innovate faster, and scale seamlessly. This collaboration ensures that SMBs can access the same powerful tools and technologies that drive success for larger enterprises, without the need for significant upfront investment.

The Solution

In addressing the disaster recovery (DR) needs of Target Engineering, Zero&One introduces its fully managed Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), powered by the robust capabilities of AWS. At the heart of Zero&One's DR solution is the AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS), a cloud-native service that continuously replicates machines to a low-cost staging area in the customer's target AWS account and preferred region. This process includes the replication of operating systems, system states, configurations, databases, applications, and files, ensuring a comprehensive recovery strategy. The setup and configuration phase involves establishing the Transit and Disaster Recovery AWS Accounts under AWS Organizations, complete with MAP Lite tagging. This setup extends to the creation of VPCs, Subnets, NACLs, Security Groups, Route Tables, Transit Gateways, Resource Access Manager, and Transit Gateway Attachments using Infrastructure as Code/CDKs. Additionally, essential services such as AWS CloudTrail, AWS CloudWatch, AWS Config, AWS KMS, GuardDuty (Basic), Secrets Manager with fine-grained permissions, and Systems Manager Session Manager for EC2 instances are implemented to ensure a secure and efficient DR environment.

For the Transit Account, a Site-to-Site VPN connection is established from the on-premise environment to the AWS Transit account, along with necessary routing configurations and a Client VPN Server setup for up to 10 employees, facilitating secure access and communication. The initial DR environment setup includes configuring AWS DRS and its related replication instances, security groups, network settings, and the installation of DRS agents on the source machines. This setup is complemented by the establishment of a recovery point and the execution of a failover to assess the outcomes. Now, monitoring and alerts are set up using Datadog for critical metrics such as EC2 CPU utilization, disk read/write operations, status checks, and memory utilization, alongside budgeting and billing reports to maintain operational efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Finally, the security architecture is stimulated with access key generation to store backups in AWS S3, consolidated security findings, automated and continuous security checks, vulnerability scans, and granular IAM permissions for users, ensuring a secure and resilient DR framework.

Results & Benefits

Implementing Zero&One's Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) with the power of AWS has developed Target Engineering's ability to protect against IT disasters, ensuring unparalleled uptime and data integrity. Zero&One's DRaaS significantly minimized Target Engineering's operational risks by achieving sub-second Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and reducing Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) to minutes. This solution streamlined disaster recovery processes, reduced compute costs by 95%, and consolidated DR tools, enhancing reliability while simplifying operations. The transition to AWS DRS also aligns with Target Engineering's strategic growth, ensuring rapid, cost-effective disaster recovery with minimal downtime, thereby safeguarding their business continuity efficiently.