Building a Resilient Disaster Recovery Solution for Macro Group Pharmaceuticals with AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery

Industry: Pharmaceuticals Region: Egypt (on-premises) → AWS Europe (Ireland) AWS Services Used: AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (DRS), Amazon EC2, Amazon EBS, Amazon VPC, AWS Site-to-Site VPN, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS IAM

Executive Summary

Macro Group Pharmaceuticals partnered with VArrow Technologies to design, build, and validate a hybrid disaster recovery solution on AWS. Using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS), VArrow implemented continuous, block-level replication for two of Macro Group’s business-critical on-premises systems — its file server and its ticketing system — into a resilient, multi-Availability Zone AWS environment. A fully tested disaster recovery drill validated a 25-minute Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and a 5-minute Recovery Point Objective (RPO), both meeting or beating the customer’s targets.

About the Customer

Macro Group Pharmaceuticals operates critical business systems across multiple on-premises sites in Egypt, supporting day-to-day pharmaceutical operations. Reliable access to internal file storage and its IT service/ticketing platform is essential to keeping the business running without interruption.

The Challenge

Macro Group’s critical systems ran solely from on-premises infrastructure with no automated, tested path to recovery in the event of a site-wide outage. Without a validated disaster recovery capability, any hardware failure, environmental event, or other disruption at the primary data center risked extended downtime, lost productivity, and potential data loss for pharmaceutical operations that depend on consistent system availability.

Macro Group needed a disaster recovery solution that could: – Continuously replicate critical workloads to the cloud with minimal data loss – Recover business systems quickly enough to avoid meaningful business disruption – Be proven through real, non-disruptive testing — not just designed on paper – Scale to additional systems over time without re-architecting the foundation

The Solution

VArrow designed and implemented a hybrid disaster recovery architecture using AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (AWS DRS), targeting the AWS Europe (Ireland) Region.

Key architectural elements:

• Multi-Availability Zone AWS landing zone: A purpose-built Amazon VPC segmented into public, private, staging, recovery, and isolated drill subnets across two Availability Zones — separating live replication traffic, recovery infrastructure, and non-disruptive test environments.
• Secure hybrid connectivity: AWS Site-to-Site VPN connections from the customer’s on-premises network to AWS, terminated on a Virtual Private Gateway, providing a private, encrypted path for replication traffic.
• Continuous block-level replication: AWS DRS replication agents installed on the protected servers, continuously replicating changed data to dedicated staging subnets with minimal performance impact on production systems.
• Right-sized recovery compute: Amazon EC2 recovery instances configured and right-sized to match each workload’s performance profile, backed by Amazon EBS storage optimized for DRS staging costs.
• Extended Active Directory for seamless recovery: Redundant, AWS-based Domain Controllers deployed across both Availability Zones so that recovered systems authenticate locally in AWS without depending on the original on-premises identity infrastructure.
• Monitoring and operational readiness: Amazon CloudWatch alarms configured to track replication health, VPN tunnel status, and core infrastructure — giving Macro Group’s team ongoing visibility into recovery readiness.
• Infrastructure as Code: The AWS environment was provisioned using Terraform, ensuring the recovery infrastructure is repeatable, auditable, and easy to extend to additional workloads.

VArrow protected two of Macro Group’s most critical systems as part of this engagement: the file server and the OS ticketing system.

Validating the Solution: The DR Drill

A solution is only as good as its last successful test. VArrow executed a planned, non-disruptive DR drill, launching both protected systems into isolated drill subnets to validate recovery without impacting production.

The drill confirmed: – Successful boot and “running” state for both recovery instances – Full connectivity via RDP/SSH – Application functionality, including a live test of the ticketing web application – File share accessibility, matching production configuration – Security group and network configuration parity with the live environment – Active CloudWatch monitoring on recovered instances – Successful resumption of replication immediately following the drill

Results

Beyond the numbers, the engagement gave Macro Group Pharmaceuticals a documented, tested Recovery Runbook and a foundation they can confidently extend to additional systems in the future — turning disaster recovery from a theoretical plan into a proven, repeatable capability.

Why It Matters

For a pharmaceutical business, downtime isn’t just an inconvenience — it can directly affect day-to-day operations and the people who depend on them. By partnering with VArrow to build and validate a cloud-based disaster recovery solution on AWS, Macro Group Pharmaceuticals moved from an unproven recovery plan to a tested, measurable capability — with recovery times beating their own targets and a clear path to protect additional systems going forward.

VArrow Technologies is an AWS Partner specializing in cloud migration, disaster recovery, and managed services. To learn how VArrow can help design and validate your organization’s disaster recovery strategy on AWS, contact us.