A recent 80% price cut for CloudEndure Disaster Recovery services from Amazon Web Services (AWS) could be a boon for channel partners that offer DR services to their customers by making the important services more affordable for a wider range of users.

AWS recently dropped the price of the CloudEndure DR services to $0.028 per hour per server, which amounts to about $20 per server per month. That could help partners grow their DR businesses by stressing the improved affordability of the services, Tim Femister, vice president of national practices for ConvergeOne, a Bloomington, Minnesota-based systems integrator, told Channel Futures.

ConvergeOne’s Tim Femister

Femister said his company had partnered with CloudEndure for some time before AWS acquired CloudEndure a year ago, and that he anticipated that the acquisition might eventually help lower prices.

“It makes it that much more affordable for our customers,” he said of the CloudEndure services from AWS. “With all the security problems out there being faced by customers, disaster recovery capabilities are more needed than ever. For us, it’s a really happy marriage that will improve our overall opportunity” to provide the services at a lower cost.

The CloudEndure Disaster Recovery service help customers minimize downtime and data loss by continuously replicating the contents of a customer’s on-premises, virtual or cloud-based systems to a low-cost staging area in the AWS region of their choice, according to AWS. The services also move from contract-based to usage-based billing for customers to align it with the traditional AWS consumption pricing model.

Gonen Stein, the head of product strategy for CloudEndure at AWS, told Channel Futures that the price cut was part of a natural progression that occurred since the acquisition by Amazon.

CloudEndure’s Gonen Stein

“With CloudEndure now being part of AWS, we are able to take advantage of greater operational efficiencies that allow us to pass additional savings to customers,” he said. “Customers can now easily use our solution by paying a per-server hourly rate instead of committing to a long-term contract or set number of servers.”

The block-level replication provided by CloudEndure includes the operating system, configuration files, databases, applications and data files. CloudEndure Disaster Recovery can replicate any database or application that runs on supported versions of Linux or Windows, according to AWS. It is also commonly used with Oracle and SQL Server, as well as enterprise applications such as SAP to provide on-premises-to-cloud DR, cross-regional DR and cross-cloud DR, the company said.

Dan Olds, principal IT analyst with Gabriel Consulting Group, said the CloudEndure price reduction should help channel partners expand their sales of such services.

“The price cut is a good thing and hard to argue with or find fault with,” said Olds. “This should make disaster recovery affordable to almost every company, which is great.”

By working with customers on AWS DR practices, partners will get closer to their customers by getting deeper views into every part of their businesses, while also gaining the ability to recommend ways to make them more digitally efficient, secure and responsive to business needs, said Olds.

“This is something they should pursue with every customer,” he said. “Most every customer has some sort of backup, but fewer have a good…

… disaster recovery plan. Fewer still have ever tested their disaster recovery plan in real life — this is something that every enterprise data center should do at least once a year.”

Another analyst, Charles King of Pund-IT, said that even with the 80% reduction in pricing, there should be enough overhead for channel partners to be reimbursed for their services and still pass along significant savings to customers.

“Channel partners should be great conduits for explaining the value and benefits of AWS’ new pricing to customers,” he said. “DR is something that’s often slighted or ignored by many businesses; in fact, it’s essentially an insurance policy for critical business applications and data. The AWS pricing change should enable channel partners to provide those benefits to a wide range of their customers.”

Rob Enderle, principal analyst with Enderle Group, said that customers will need to do the math for DR costs to assure they pick the approach, and the vendor, that is most financially beneficial to them.

For AWS, the price cut could certainly increase the company’s business with channel partners, said Enderle.

“The more tools you provide a channel partner – within reasonable limits – the better able the channel partner is to close deals for you,” he said.