Using CloudEndure and Cutover for Enterprise Disaster Recovery and Migration Workflows

By Madan Kumar, Sr. Solutions Engineer – Cutover
By Siva Sadhu, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS

Cutover

Companies are doubling down on developing operational maturity strategies and execution postures.

Your people matter more. Your technology investments matter more. Your selection of eco-partners matters more. Your cloud journey matters more. Being compliant matters more.

The list goes on, but the bottom line is this: providing exceptional customer experiences is essential to accelerating and sustaining revenue growth.

As organizations continue to embrace digital transformation and adopt agile software development practices, executing critical events faster and with more confidence becomes crucial. This effort can support a company’s cloud adoption velocity, competitive advantage, and help ensure regulatory compliance.

Planning for disaster recovery (DR) is a vital aspect of an organization’s business continuity plan. The Cutover platform, along with CloudEndure, provide a best-in-class integration for operational resilience.

Cutover is an AWS Partner with an AWS-qualified software offering that allows you to orchestrate and optimize workflows requiring manual and automation tasks built together. At the core of the platform is the Cutover runbooks feature, which can be thought of as a dynamic to-do list. This allows you to bring together the teams, tools, and tasks involved in a program of work in order.

In this post, we will explore how Cutover can provide a best-in-class execution platform that enables operational resilience best practices across your organization. We’ll also discuss how Cutover’s integration with CloudEndure allows you to failover quicker, more efficiently, and with greater visibility across your hybrid cloud environments.

The State of Disaster Recovery

The reliability pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework emphasizes operational resiliency of a workload to perform its intended function correctly and consistently when it’s expected to. This includes the ability to operate and test the workload through its total lifecycle.

In a world where there is zero tolerance for downtime, IT disasters such as data center failure, server corruption, or cyberattacks can disrupt an organization’s business, cause data loss, impact revenue, and damage reputation.

A well-defined disaster recovery strategy enables the organization to regain use of critical systems and IT infrastructure as soon as possible after a disaster occurs, with minimal loss of data.

With Cutover and CloudEndure, organizations can simplify their cloud journey by utilizing a single, automated solution for all applications and workloads, complete with real-time 360-degree visibility and dynamic editability. Every event is indelibly audited for regulatory scrutiny, process improvement, and reporting.

Cutover and Operational Resilience

Cutover runbooks allow you to assign tasks to the people responsible for them, and set up task dependencies and timings to ensure everyone knows exactly what they need to do and when.

When you start the work, built-in communications keep everybody on track via email, text, or Slack/Teams. You can even set up calls and video chats on the platform. Starting and finishing tasks will notify teams and stakeholders as you make progress, and you can see exactly how far along you are without needing to disturb the people doing the work.

Cutover runbooks also integrate with a variety of tools you leverage every day, automating tasks that can be manually intensive. Trigger build pipelines via Jenkins or Ansible, close change request tickets via ServiceNow, create JIRA tickets, or trigger failover recovery plans in CloudEndure.

Figure 1 – Cutover runbook.

The Cutover

The Cutover and CloudEndure solution provides all of the feature functionality of the Cutover runbooks, along with its visibility and orchestration with a best-in-class disaster recovery failover solution.

CloudEndure DR minimizes downtime and data loss by providing fast, reliable recovery of physical, virtual, and cloud-based servers into the AWS Cloud.

CloudEndure continuously replicates machines (including operating system, system state configuration, databases, applications, and files) into a low-cost staging area in your target AWS account and preferred region.

In the case of a disaster, you can configure CloudEndure to automatically launch thousands of your machines in their fully provisioned state in minutes. By replicating your machines into a low-cost staging area while still being able to launch fully provisioned machines within minutes, CloudEndure can significantly reduce the cost of your DR infrastructure.

Cutover with CloudEndure allows organizations to trigger any recovery plan that is created in CloudEndure.

How it Works

In the screen shots below, you can see we have created a recovery plan within Cutover that allows us to failover an instance we have configured with the CloudEndure agent.

Figure 2 – CloudEndure console recovery plans.

Cutover then will connect to our CloudEndure instance and leverage CloudEndure APIs to automatically trigger the recovery plan.

Figure 3 – Cutover CloudEndure task integration.

Along with an execution framework that’s provided by the runbooks, each runbook provides real-time visibility into progress through the dashboard view. This customizable view allows stakeholders to get updates into the status of their recovery/failover efforts.

Figure 4 – Cutover real-time runbook dashboard.

Conclusion

The state of operational resilience is an ever-changing one, constantly requiring more complex workflows, teams, and automation to come together than ever before. Current tooling doesn’t provide a framework to be able to coordinate, execute, and troubleshoot across your various disaster recovery initiatives.

Cutover can provide an agnostic platform purpose-built for you to manage, execute, and process improve across your resilience goals. With Cutover’s integration with CloudEndure, you can leverage Cutover to automatically failover across your various environments with ease.

Book your tailored Cutover demo to discover how it can bring transformative levels of control, efficiency, and risk reduction to your organization.

You can also learn more around how enterprises are leveraging Cutover for all things operational resilience.

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Cutover – AWS Partner Spotlight

Cutover is an AWS Partner whose platform helps global organizations to manage technology delivery and release, operational resilience, and transformations.

Contact Cutover | Partner Overview | AWS Marketplace

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