I can provide a specific example of a situation where AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery helped us recover our critical systems. Last year, we had storms in the state with high winds and flooding in many areas that caused damage and threatened two of our data centers. Using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, we were able to fail over our customer management and metering systems to the AWS cloud within a few hours. When we replicate and fail over our customer management, metering, and outage tracking systems to the AWS cloud, we were able to upload to the AWS cloud in just under three hours, compared to an estimated 36 to 48 hours had we done it through manual recovery. Hundreds of thousands of customers were affected by the storms, but since we were able to replicate it to the AWS cloud in under three hours, our customers continued to receive accurate outage notifications through SMS and email because the replicated systems remained operational. Our field crew teams also had real-time access to the pole IDs, substation telemetry, and the asset status that helped them in improving restoration efficiency. This reduced the average time to restore power per affected area by 25%. Billing and regulatory reporting data were fully intact, which helped us prevent any errors and ensured compliance with the Australian Energy Regulator requirements. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery has allowed us to maintain critical operations during high-impact natural disasters, protecting both our customers and our assets while demonstrating measurable improvements in our response time and regulatory compliance.

Continuous block-level replication and automated orchestration have significantly helped our team in daily operations. I can relate this to last year's storm, during which several substations in our state experienced partial outages. Thanks to the continuous block-level replication, all the telemetry from SCADA systems, pole inspections, and customer meter readings were still up-to-date in the cloud. This allowed our control center to monitor real-time network conditions without relying on compromised on-site servers. Automated orchestration means that if one data center server in our state went offline, AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery automatically spins up the replicated systems in the cloud, including network configuration and monitoring dashboards. This reduced what would have been a manual 10 to 12-hour effort down to less than three hours. The monitoring integration also played a key role because alerts were triggered immediately when replication lag approached the thresholds, helping our teams proactively address issues even before any customer impact occurred. For our daily teams, these features provide our field crews and control center staff the confidence that our critical operational data, such as outage reports, asset condition, and customer information will always be accurate and available, helping teams prioritize restoration, maintain safety, and comply with AER reporting requirements.

One very small but handy feature is AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery point-in-time recovery snapshots. On one end, continuous replication keeps the data current, but having these point-in-time recovery snapshots allows us to quickly roll back specific systems just in case a configuration error happens or if corrupted data is accidentally pushed without affecting other replicated workloads. Another feature that doesn't always get highlighted is that AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery supports both IT and OT workloads. Many disaster recovery tools focus just on IT, but the ability to replicate operational technology data, such as SCADA systems and pole telemetry, gives our field crews real-time access during outages, which has been invaluable during natural disasters including storms and extreme weather events. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery also has minimal bandwidth and storage overhead for replication, helping us manage costs effectively while maintaining robust disaster recovery capabilities across our thousands of kilometers of network and hundreds of thousands of customers.

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery has positively impacted our organization. Prior to using it, recovering our critical IT and OT systems after an outage could take anywhere between 10 to 12 hours manually. However, after implementing AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery and using its automated orchestration, we can now restore systems in under three hours. This means we have reduced our downtime by more than 70%. We have improved our data reliability, ensuring that telemetry, SCADA, and customer metering data are always up-to-date, which has reduced errors in operational decision-making. In terms of costs, we utilized cloud failover instead of building a full secondary on-premises disaster recovery site, resulting in an avoided capital expenditure of approximately $1.2 million while maintaining regulatory compliance with AER. We have saved time, money, and ensured customer data is up-to-date, allowing our teams to quickly generate compliance reports and outage logs, meeting AER timelines without last-minute scrambling. Our field crews and control center staff also have instant access to all our replicated OT and IT systems during any emergency, enabling faster response times and safer operations. These are some specific outcomes thanks to AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery.

Since implementing AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, we have seen improvements in customer satisfaction and regulatory audits. During the storm last year, the replicated SCADA and metering systems allowed us to communicate outage status in near real-time, rather than relying on delayed manual reporting, which improved our customer response metrics by roughly 25% due to faster updates and restoration notifications. Our customers were able to plan their time more effectively during outages, reducing frustrations. Regarding regulatory audits for the Australian Energy Regulator, having continuous, accurate, and auditable data from AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery has simplified our submissions. Recovery logs, outage timelines, and asset status were available immediately, which has helped us reduce our time spent on manually documenting regulatory reports by about 40% and minimized our risk of non-compliance. Our field teams reported that having up-to-date cloud-accessible OT data such as pole conditions or substation status reduces guesswork and improves their safety. The accelerated restoration work has boosted their confidence in operational decisions.

This service is very handy in terms of using affordable storage, minimal compute resources, and point-in-time recovery to ensure business continuity during outages or disasters.

Continuous block-level replication stands out for me the most. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery continuously replicates block-level data from the source environment to a staging area in AWS, ensuring that data is always up to date and minimizing data loss during a disaster. Other valuable features include automated failover and recovery as well as non-disruptive testing.

AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery supports a wide range of source environments, including VMware, Hyper-V, physical servers, and other cloud providers, making it versatile for different IT infrastructures. The flexible recovery options allow recovery of applications to their original environment or to a new instance in AWS while retaining the existing metadata and security parameters. The cost-effective staging area design reduces costs by utilizing affordable storage and minimal compute resources, making it economical for ongoing replication.

It has greatly impacted our company's specific outcomes and improved production failures. For customers, it has been quite beneficial in terms of providing automated failover and recovery options as well as flexible recovery options, which allows recovery of applications to the original environment or to a new instance in AWS while retaining the existing metadata and security parameters, which is quite useful. Encryption and security is also one of the best features. Data is encrypted during transit and at rest, ensuring information remains secure throughout the disaster recovery process.

There has definitely been a lot of improvements in recovery time with very less downtime because we already understand how to recover using the clear process that AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery provides. There has been approximately a thirty percent improvement in terms of recovery time.

The best features AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery offers are the insights and alerting, which inform developers or application developers about what's going on and how the system is running.

The insights and alerting features help my team day-to-day by allowing SREs to know when an event has happened and how we are supposed to be doing recovery. They provide alerts to the SREs and groups that are subscribed, and they are alerted early. I am currently exploring the features, but for now, I find it very useful in the event of the disaster that happened.

What I like about ECR AWS is that it is a fully managed service, so I don't need to manage the underlying infrastructure or worry about scalability in AWS concerning building, maintenance, security, and high availability. 

It offers seamless integration with services like ACL, EKS, and Fargate for deploying containerized applications. It works great with AWS, and it is flexible to use a public repository for open-source projects or a private repository for secure storage.

For the past year, I have been using AWS, as there was previously no native replication service available. Initially, they offered services like CloudEndure, which was a third-party service. This caused problems with integrations with existing servers. However, with AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery Service being a native service, integration is seamless. Moreover, since it is a managed service, I reduce my time to manage infrastructure and applications, which adds another benefit.

I appreciate the automated orchestration of recovery processes in this solution. That's a good thing, especially once you are able to configure something with this tool. I haven't tested the automated recovery, but they do support it. It is beneficial, especially integration with Route 53 and automatically using Route 53 to switch to a different region directly.

Because it has native integrations with all the Route 53 features, that's a good aspect. The part I really appreciated about it was they're not just AWS Backup; along with that, they give you an option to quickly do the drills. If you want to conduct DR drills, it's very useful.

The strong points are the stability and scalability of the solution, as well as the convenience of it being cloud-based.

The product's most valuable features include its ease of deployment, cost-effectiveness due to AWS's pay-as-you-go pricing model, and continuous data protection.

AWS, as a cloud platform, helps build trust in its services. There have been incidents where clients using Amazon services faced security breaches, but these stories seem more frequent with Microsoft. This might be a personal bias, and others may have different experiences. AWS proactively protects its reputation by addressing issues and investing heavily in its tools, app tech, and engineers.

CloudEndure Disaster Recovery is a fairly stable solution.

The most valuable aspect of CloudEndure Disaster Recovery is its instant block replication feature. This allows us to perform live block verification and eliminates the need to concern ourselves with recovery point objectives. This capability is particularly advantageous for critical workloads.

It is easy to use. I haven't had any issues with the client and console. 

When we tested it, it worked fine. 

The solution is free to use. 

The setup is pretty straightforward.

It's stable.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support is helpful and responsive. 

The ability to clone is very helpful.

The installation process is very easy.

The solution's cost is reasonable. It's on the cheaper side and not too expensive for users. 

It is a scalable product. 

In terms of stability, it's reliable.

For regular backup and restore solutions, this product is fine.

The speedy, quick configuration and installation was the initial reason for the product and what I enjoyed about it. Now, it just continues to be simple and works well.

• Ease of use
• Reliability
• Cost
• Stability

Disaster recovery. It is what we have the product for.

The ability to replicate our database and our data from one cloud to another is the most valuable feature. We are using it for disaster recovery so we replicated all our databases from Rackspace Cloud to Amazon Cloud. We moved from Rackspace to AWS because we didn't want to end up in a situation where we would be locked, so we chose to replicate our databases to another public cloud.