American Board of Pediatrics embraces the speed, flexibility, and cost-efficiency of AWS

SHI’s cloud experts help our customer achieve a modern DR solution with AWS Native services and CloudEndure.

Challenge:

Facing an upcoming disaster recovery (DR) contract expiration, American Board of Pediatrics (ABP) – an independent, nonprofit medical organization operating for more than 85 years – needed a partner that could competently migrate their DR infrastructure and strategy to the cloud.

ABP's existing DR strategy didn’t allow for testing or DR gamedays, took nearly 48 hours to become fully operational, and tied up an IT budget that could otherwise be reallocated to customer-facing initiatives.

Wanting to capitalize on the speed, flexibility, and cost-efficiency of a modern DR solution, the customer turned to SHI for cloud options.

Solution:

SHI helped ABP review their current business continuity and DR strategy to determine an ideal recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO). To achieve their desired results, we led the installation and deployment of CloudEndure within AWS and the customer's environment.

CloudEndure cut ABP's costs by 80% by utilizing replication machines mapped to EBS volumes instead of entire machines sitting at a passive site – allowing SHI to templatize failover orchestration. Using CloudEndure, SHI architects migrated necessary pilot light infrastructure, allowing the customer to have Active Directory (AD) infrastructure at the ready in the event of a failover. SHI led ABP through on-site, paired working sessions, helping the customer:

• Reduce costs by 80%.
• Establish DR runbooks.
• Migrate their DR infrastructure.
• Modernize their DR Strategy.
• Reduce RTO/RPO.

SHI also transitioned ABP from a third-party cold-site to AWS. This provided flexibility of terms, eliminating the need for costly annual contracts, and allowed the customer to take advantage of a pilot light DR strategy without increasing costs.

To reduce defects caused by manual intervention and to ease remediation, SHI architects configured CloudEndure Blueprints. These templates would live as configurations within the customer's CloudEndure account and offer a consistent, repeatable, and orchestrated process free from the potential of human error. This allowed SHI and the customer to rapidly test the solution and build out a cohesive disaster recovery runbook.

Outcome:

The new, cloud-based solution enabled the customer to reduce their RPO to seconds and their RTO from 48 hours to under 30 minutes, allowing for a much tighter uptime SLA.

Adoption of AWS Native and SaaS services allowed ABP to capitalize on the speed, flexibility, and cost-efficiency of the cloud. This cloud solution granted a stronger, consistent DR strategy testable at their leisure. The templated nature of CloudEndure also freed up administrative effort.

In the end, ABP saved around 80% of their annual DR budget while granting the flexibility of cloud billing.