Developing a cost-effective disaster recovery (DR) strategy that works across both modern cloud and on-premises environments is sometimes tricky. Fortunately, a powerful DR solution from AWS and Cloudnexa gives your organization access to redundant resources that can protect your infrastructure against disruption. Recover from outages and swiftly restore data and services, all while maintaining tight control over costs.

The changing face of business disruption

Severe weather, determined hackers, and disgruntled insiders are just the beginning of what enterprises face today. Remote work and increased connectivity are also creating new openings for network outages and intrusions. In addition, a deeper reliance on outside partners has significantly boosted the risk profile for many firms. In fact, Forrester estimates that 60% of security incidents will be chalked up to third parties.

Inadequate DR capabilities can be disastrous for your business. Companies hit by ransomware, for example, sometimes take weeks or more to recover their data and restart systems. Add on lost revenue, reputational harm, and the possibility of financial penalties, and guarding your organization against disaster becomes central to your long-term sustainability.

How long could your business last without taking orders, making products, or delivering services?

For enterprises working in the cloud, where employees and customers rely heavily on a smooth-functioning infrastructure and supporting apps, you need a DR strategy that enables your teams to avoid trouble and also empowers them to quickly respond to trouble if it shows up.

Disaster recovery roadblocks abound

Securing resources to boost your disaster recovery posture can be a challenge. With the high price and low availability of technology talent, it’s difficult to maintain the right staff—and enough of them—in-house to administer a robust DR program. Funding is also a concern, as businesses consider the costs of duplicating their infrastructure, OS, and third-party licenses to run workloads in a standby or redundant site.

Logistics and responsiveness are also top issues. Legacy DR technologies often took a long time to recover workloads, which is particularly worrisome when dealing with mission-critical platforms and processes where aggressive recovery time objectives (RTOs) are a must. As more workloads move to the cloud, the varying DR requirements of different apps creates confusion for IT teams and makes the specter of scaling even more daunting.

[CALLOUT]
A report by Uptime Institute found that almost 40% of organizations suffered a major, human error-caused outage over the past three years, and 85% of those outages resulted from procedures and processes that were either flawed or weren’t followed.
[END CALLOUT]

Not surprisingly, an adherence to earlier and sometimes outdated practices still prevents some enterprises from modernizing their disaster recovery programs. In the past, DR plans often featured tape backups, which were squirreled away in somebody’s garage. Even today, some DR programs leverage a similarly haphazard approach. Untested processes and outdated procedures are expected to harmonize multiple systems of varying ages, and essentially everyone just hopes the team can figure out a workable recovery plan on the fly.

Protect your AWS environments and on-prem assets against disaster

Because most businesses now have a blend of on-premises and cloud-based apps, disaster recovery is more complex. Fortunately, AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS) is a cost-effective way to seamlessly handle hybrid scenarios and provide a single, unified solution for your entire IT environment. The service supports common enterprise apps and databases, enabling fast and reliable recovery using minimal compute to help give you peace of mind.

With AWS DRS, enterprises pay for recovery site resources only when they’re needed, meaning you can ditch the cost of sustaining those resources during idle times. AWS elasticity and usage-based billing further eliminates the need for expensive duplicate hardware and licenses. And because your resources are delivered through AWS, you can convert CapEx to OpEx as part of your cost control plan.

Another big benefit of AWS DRS is access to Availability Zones, which enable the use of geographically dispersed, fault-isolated resources. This gives you the ability to leverage separate power sources and connectivity for your replicated data. It’s a core component in the AWS well-architected framework, designed to help you maintain an AWS environment with high reliability in a world of uncertainty.

Making the implementation of a strong disaster recovery program even easier, AWS DRS allows you to employ proven, repeatable testing protocols. Your team can run disaster recovery readiness drills and test other elements in your DR plan more frequently without impacting user activities. Fewer people are needed to carry out testing and you’re less likely to create disruption across your workloads, plus you can maintain comprehensive recovery capabilities while scaling your AWS environment.

Modern disaster recovery with a Cloudnexa boost

Cloudnexa builds on the capabilities of AWS DRS with powerful features such as our 24/7/365 monitoring using onshore resources. This enables faster detection of potential issues as well as faster response times to incidents such as malware, connectivity disruptions, and service outages. Cloudnexa can deliver maximum uptime and peace of mind that your environment is properly monitored and protected in the event of trouble. As emerging technologies become available and disaster recovery best practices evolve, our team of AWS experts will help you understand how those changes may affect your operations and provide guidance on maintaining high reliability.

If your disaster recovery program needs a modern boost, we’d love to show you how AWS DRS can help you reduce complexity, trim costs, and increase resilience. Get in touch with a Cloudnexa AWS expert today to learn more.

We’re pleased and proud to announce that Cloudnexa has again been awarded renewals for our AWS Premier Partner and AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP) Partner designations. These credentials offer important recognition of Cloudnexa’s skills and service capabilities. They also provide customers with a useful measure of our team’s commitment to—and success in—delivering consistently excellent support and high-value services across the AWS ecosystem.

AWS maintains an extensive network of partner programs for different focus areas, and each has a range of designations available. The Premier Partner and MSP Partner tiers are challenging to reach, with providers sometimes working for years before achieving the minimum requirements.

AWS Premier Partner

The AWS Partner program supports three levels—Select, Advanced, and Premier—with Premier representing the partners with the most experience and leadership recognition in their regions and/or markets.

Cloudnexa has held the Premier Partner designation since 2013. We’ve completed more AWS implementations than almost any other provider and we’ve built an extensive knowledge base around the AWS ecosystem. Our team is heavily invested in our AWS practice and that commitment is reflected in our long-standing position at the Premier Partner tier. The Premier Partner credential involves recurring audits and other confirmatory processes through AWS. Meeting these advanced knowledge, experience, and customer success requirements gives Cloudnexa customers important external validation of our delivery of AWS services—our capabilities, our services, our support, and our expertise.

There are some key elements in achieving the Premier Partner designation. It’s an award that partners need to earn annually through consistent service and ongoing competency development. The requirements include net new customer delivery, net new revenue, sufficient resources related to engineers that are certified both at the associate and the professional levels, and the number of AWS programs the partner participates in with meaningful results. Remaining an AWS Premier Partner also requires achieving sufficiently high customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores every year, meaning 30 different customers must rank the provider’s practice highly on customer satisfaction. That’s a big number and it prevents many otherwise capable providers from achieving Premier Partner status. Cloudnexa often achieves it early in the year due to our commitment to service and the strength of our customer base.

Core to the Premier Partner designation is the clear demonstration that a partner can not only achieve big goals, but that they can do it again and again. Our renewal shows we can migrate and support customers on AWS, and that we can also maintain those results year over year. As technology innovations accelerate and business pressures become more dynamic, delivering consistent support and delighting clients during an initial engagement can be a difficult feat in itself. Building the capabilities and expertise to sustain that strong performance over time is the hallmark of an AWS Premier Partner.

AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP) Partner

Managed service providers offer customers access to targeted skill sets and trusted advice to architect and oversee their environments, scale operations, protect infrastructures from cybersecurity risks, and apply various compliance frameworks.

The AWS MSP Partner designation validates a provider’s managed service competency. As part of Cloudnexa’s ongoing evolution, this year we added SOC 2 Type II compliance as part of our MSP Partner renewal. This advanced step further differentiates our services and capabilities from those offered by other providers. The increased focus on compliance helps us be better prepared on multiple fronts, from service delivery to customer support to data protection, and translates into increased satisfaction for our clients.

In addition, the AWS MSP Partner program requires a full audit every three years, and 2022 was a complete audit process year for our team. Working with AWS through the renewal program is an important opportunity to continue improving our capabilities and our systems. AWS provides valuable advice and guidance on areas we should be exploring or expanding to ensure we’re positioned to provide our customers with the best services and support for their needs today and into the future.

The scale of the AWS ecosystem is vast, boasting around 50,000 Partners in total. However, there are only about 160 MSPs globally and fewer than 50 in North America. The MSP designation recognizes AWS Partners with the broad skills, deep experience, and AWS expertise to provide customers with full lifecycle solutions. We’re pleased that our customers can be confident we’re among a small group of providers capable of supporting their most advanced and ambitious digital transformation goals.

If you’d like to learn more about our AWS Premier Partner and MSP Partner designations, or if you’re interested in discussing how we can help your business move your cloud strategy forward, please get in touch.

Maintaining visibility across your AWS accounts is key to optimizing your environment, ensuring good reliability and performance, and keeping costs in check. Having the technical insights you need to make good business decisions about your AWS services and consumption can be difficult, though, particularly in more complex scenarios. If your organization has multiple accounts or your enterprise has adopted a fast-moving and innovative digital transformation strategy, knowing how things stand may be more challenging than you expected.

That’s where Cloudnexa’s Cloudscan can help.

The Cloudscan solution

There are a wide variety of signals flowing through your infrastructure. Cloudscan—which is available through the AWS Marketplace and offered exclusively to Cloudnexa customers as a complimentary part of our service—brings those inputs together in a single solution to give you visibility into your AWS environments.

Your team may not have the bandwidth to constantly watch for issues, but Cloudscan does. The service conducts continuous, automated audits, helping to uncover opportunities to optimize your AWS environments and ensure your AWS accounts are operating at full efficiency. Cloudscan monitors and aggregates a wide range of metrics and indicators into a simplified view with easy-to-understand graphical reporting on the important elements in your account, including:

• Security
• Performance
• Reliability
• Operational excellence
• Cost optimization

A continuous monitoring solution designed for AWS environments

Your infrastructure is always in motion, and you need a way to keep up with changes. Understanding how factors such as the addition of new software, increased consumption, evolving business needs, emerging cybersecurity risks, and user base growth influence the health and performance of your AWS environment is often tricky.

• Have you strayed from the latest best practices?
• Is your infrastructure still properly protected?
• Are you paying for services you aren’t using?

Gathering and interpreting these insights takes time and pulls your team away from their core activities.

As a long-standing AWS Consulting Partner, we chose to develop our own software to help our customers get the visibility they need to drive more business value through AWS services. To ensure Cloudscan delivers the quality insights our clients expect, it’s been validated by AWS through a foundational technical review. The solution underwent an audit on best practices and capabilities, and successfully passing that process demonstrates Cloudnexa’s deep expertise managing high-performing AWS environments and the Cloudscan service’s close alignment with the pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

The customer benefits of Cloudscan

Visibility

We know how valuable timely guidance is when you want to understand how your environments are performing. Cloudscan continually scans our customers’ AWS accounts and automatically identifies potential risks or issues that don’t align with best practices. The insights available through the service enable you to provision your resources more efficiently, improve reliability, and remediate security and other risks before they cause problems.

For enterprises with multiple accounts, Cloudscan offers a rollup view that aggregates all of your accounts and regions. You can add custom checks and even export the data in CSV format for use in other analytics tools. Cloudscan conducts read-only reviews against your AWS account without any type of agents and in a way that’s completely nonintrusive.

Cost optimization

Controlling costs is a high priority for many businesses. As modernization reaches farther into the enterprise, you may find it’s more difficult to know who’s using the various software and where technologies may be redundant, underutilized, or even abandoned. Your organization could be missing out on opportunities to more effectively drive user adoption, to leverage additional automations and integrations, and to achieve better results with targeted software that can supplement or replace underperforming solutions.

Cloudscan can show you quick ways to cost optimize your AWS environments, without intrusive actions.

• Would upgrading your instances to the latest types save you money?
• Do you have instances sitting idle, where no one has logged in for weeks or even months?

As consumption patterns continue to shift, enterprises encounter new cost optimization challenges. End user access—to data as well as to core business systems—is expanding. Companies increasingly want to quickly scale operations up or down to respond to customer demands, seasonal changes in sales volumes, and accelerated software development and release cycles. Cloudscan offers valuable capabilities that can help root out waste and uncontrolled spend. Our solution also gives you a way to maintain visibility into cost drivers as your environment scales.

Could your AWS environments be more cost efficient?

If you need better visibility across all of your AWS accounts, or if you want to see where cost optimization opportunities may be slipping through your fingers, our Cloudscan service can help. And because Cloudscan was built as an extension of Cloudnexa’s service delivery, you have an experienced team on your side to assist you in identifying and applying the right actions. The Cloudnexa team offers professional service engagements to remediate issues uncovered by Cloudscan on your behalf. During regular reviews, our team will go over all the issues identified through Cloudscan. We’ll break down remediation status for high-risk and urgent issues, plus discuss findings that may require design or architecting changes, redeployment, or other longer-term action plans.

Learn more about Cloudscan today or contact us for more details on how the right monitoring solutions can empower you to understand and cost optimize your AWS environments.