A mid-sized enterprise relies heavily on its on-premises virtualized infrastructure using VMware to run core business applications, including ERP, CRM, databases, file servers, and web platforms. These systems are essential for critical operations such as finance, sales, customer service, and supply chain management. Any downtime could result in financial losses, reputational damage, and operational disruption.

The organization recognizes the growing risk of data loss caused by unforeseen disasters, ranging from natural calamities to hardware failures and the rising threat of sophisticated ransomware attacks. To mitigate these risks, the enterprise sought a reliable disaster recovery (DR) solution that would minimize downtime, reduce data loss, and ensure seamless failback once the primary environment stabilizes.

Challenges

1. High RTO and RPO:
   The existing on-premises DR strategy relied on manual processes and limited off-site capabilities. As a result, Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) stretched up to 72 hours, while Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) could extend to 48 hours, causing significant business disruption in the event of a major disaster.

2. Vulnerability to Cyber Threats:
   The increasing sophistication of malware, particularly ransomware, placed the enterprise at considerable risk. A successful attack could encrypt business-critical data and cause extended downtime, data loss, and reputational harm without a robust recovery mechanism.

3. Cost and Complexity of Secondary Data Centers:
   Maintaining a fully redundant disaster recovery site was cost-prohibitive, requiring heavy investment in hardware, networking, and skilled personnel.

4. Scalability Limitations:
   The on-premises infrastructure struggled to scale quickly for DR testing or actual failovers, limiting agility.

5. Complex Management and Testing:
   Managing separate backup and DR solutions across environments was time-consuming and error-prone. Routine DR testing consumed significant resources and disrupted operations.

Solution: Veeam Backup & Replication on AWS

To address these challenges, the enterprise implemented Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) on AWS, leveraging hybrid cloud data protection with advanced malware and ransomware safeguards.

Solution Architecture

• Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR): Deployed on AWS to capture backups and replicate critical VMs, physical servers, and applications.

• AWS S3 for Backup Storage: Cost-effective, immutable storage through Veeam’s Capacity Tier integration.

• Amazon S3 Object Lock: Configured in Compliance Mode to ensure backups cannot be deleted or modified, even by administrators, creating an “air-gapped” copy for ransomware protection.

• Direct Restore to AWS EC2: In the event of disaster, workloads can be restored directly into Amazon EC2 instances across designated regions.

• Isolated DR VPC: A dedicated Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) was established to separate recovery environments from production, preventing lateral ransomware movement.

• Backup Strategies: Support for image-level, incremental, forever forward, reverse incremental, and application-aware backups, enabling both full-system and granular recovery.

• Image-Level Backups: Veeam creates entire image-level backups of virtual machines (VMs), physical servers, and cloud instances. This captures the operating system, applications, and data, allowing for full system recovery.

• Incremental Backups with Forever Forward Incremental: This is a common and efficient method.

• Full Backup: The first backup job creates a full backup file (.VBK).

• Incremental Backups: Subsequent backups only copy changed data blocks since the last backup, saving them as incremental backup files (VIB).

• Forever Forward: Veeam can synthesize new full backups from existing incremental and full backups without requiring a new full back up from the source, optimizing storage and backup windows.

• Reverse Incremental Backups: In this method, the latest backup is always a full backup, with previous incremental backups chained to it. This can simplify recovery as the most recent state is readily available as a full backup.

• Application-Aware Processing: For critical applications (e.g., Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, Oracle, Active Directory), Veeam can perform application-aware backups. This ensures transactionally consistent backups by quiescing the application and processing transactions before the snapshot, enabling granular item-level restores later.

Benefits

By combining Veeam’s advanced capabilities with the scalability of AWS, the enterprise achieved:

• Immutable Backups: Protected against ransomware, accidental deletion, and modification.

• Fast and Reliable Recovery: Options for full instance, file-level, cross-account, and cross-region recovery.

• Cost Optimization: Flexible use of Amazon S3 tiers (Standard, IA) based on retention and access needs.

• Reduced Infrastructure Costs: Eliminated the need for costly on-premises backup hardware and secondary sites.

• Improved RTOs: Recovery windows reduced from days to hours, ensuring stronger business continuity.

Measurable Outcomes

Implementing this Veeam DR to AWS solution provides quantifiable improvements across several key areas:

Conclusion

This case illustrates how a mid-sized enterprise transformed its disaster recovery strategy by adopting Veeam Backup & Replication on AWS. With immutable backups, scalable storage, and rapid recovery options, the organization significantly reduced operational risks, cut costs, and improved resilience against both natural disasters and cyber threats.

Moving Forward with ViBiCloud

Implementing a disaster recovery and malware protection strategy requires not only the right technology but also the right expertise. Many enterprises face challenges when it comes to cloud integration, security configuration, and ongoing management of hybrid DR solutions. This is where partnering with a trusted cloud service provider becomes critical.

ViBiCloud, as an official Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) and a leading managed cloud services company in Indonesia, offers end-to-end support for implementing Disaster Recovery and Malware Protection with Veeam on AWS. From solution design and deployment to monitoring, optimization, and compliance, ViBiCloud ensures that your business achieves maximum resilience with minimal complexity.

Ready to protect your business with enterprise-grade disaster recovery?