Cloud DR for a team on AWS only: a shortlist walk-through

What does each tool document on AWS?

• Firefly: 190 AWS resource types across 48 services in its Backup and DR coverage table, including IAM, Route 53, VPC, security groups, network ACLs, WAF, EKS and RDS configuration. It does not back up data contents.
• Arpio: cross-account and cross-region failover on AWS, continuous replication of infrastructure and data, and failover tests that do not disrupt production.
• Commvault Cloud Rewind: point-in-time copies of whole application stacks; listed on AWS Marketplace.
• ControlMonkey: daily snapshots of cloud configuration, including dependencies, with one-click recovery to a known-good state; it protects configuration, not data.
• Cohesity, listed with data backup products and not scored: EC2, RDS and S3 protection with cross-region recovery and an isolated recovery environment, and Cloud Rebuild for select AWS workloads in Terraform-provisioned environments.

StackGuardian, which is not scored, also covers AWS, for codification and drift detection, without a recovery product.

Step 1: which incident worries you most?

If it is a bad change, such as a misconfiguration, a deleted resource or a faulty pipeline run, the top score on bad-change rollback is Firefly. If it is an outage or a region loss, the top scores on orchestration and on region and account loss belong to Arpio and Arpio. If you cannot choose, the published weights treat all three equally; the recovery time estimator shows the order for each.

Step 2: one tool or two?

If you already run a data backup product you trust, an infrastructure recovery tool without data protection is fine, and Firefly's lack of data backup matters less. If you want data and infrastructure from one contract, Arpio and Cloud Rewind both protect data; Commvault Cloud Rewind scores highest on it.

Step 3: what can you price today?

Arpio is the only recovery tool here whose own pricing page prices every tier: Standard at $12k single-cloud for 25 core resources and Premium at $36k single-cloud for 50, billed annually. Commvault Cloud Rewind has per-instance prices on AWS Marketplace, $0.035 per instance per hour or $291 per instance for a 12-month contract. Firefly publishes Essential at $2,499 a month billed annually, but Backup and DR is Enterprise only, custom priced. Cohesity publishes no Cloud Rebuild price. If a budget figure must exist before a sales call, that narrows the list quickly.

Step 4: who do you already buy from?

An existing Commvault or Cohesity contract changes the effort of a trial and the procurement path. Cloud Rewind is also listed on AWS Marketplace, so it can be bought through your AWS account.

What about the AWS resources nobody wrote down?

Every AWS account has resources created by hand. A recovery tool that captures the live account, as Firefly, Arpio and Cloud Rewind describe, picks them up. A tool that rebuilds from existing infrastructure-as-code definitions, as Cohesity's Cloud Rebuild does, will not until they are codified. If you do not know how much of your account is outside code, find out before the trial; it decides which kind of tool you need.

What about the account itself?

An AWS-only team still needs a second target. Cross-region recovery covers a region outage; cross-account recovery covers a compromised or deleted account. Firefly and Arpio document both on AWS. Cloud Rewind's docs describe recovery to another region, zone or account, with cross-account currently AWS only. Cohesity documents an isolated recovery environment without cross-account detail.

A short test helps here: export an inventory of one account and compare it with your templates. The difference is the part of the estate a code-based rebuild would miss.

A shortlist of two

Most AWS-only teams can stop at two: the tool with the top score on their main incident, and the one that covers the gap it leaves. For example, Firefly for bad-change rollback and rebuild scope, with a data backup product beside it; or Arpio for failover and testing, with a plan for configuration drift. Put the pair in compare several and read the reasons behind each score before the first vendor call.