Disaster recovery with Tableau on AWS

The world is full of uncertainties. The security of your data shouldn’t be one of them. 

Imagine you’re the big global widget-maker ACME, Inc., and you’re using Tableau with critical workloads in a centralized on-premises database. You are vulnerable to natural disasters, cyberattacks, and other threats. You have some hard decisions to make about upgrading hardware and software, workforce resources, and maintenance. 

Faced with that harsh reality, 30 percent of companies have decided that their invaluable Tableau workloads are safer and more secure on the cloud. Market research firm Forrester predicted that in 2021 an additional 20 percent of enterprises will move on-premises disaster recovery (DR) to the cloud. Gartner puts it bluntly: “I&O (infrastructure and operations) professionals are facing the uncomfortable truth that if a disaster strikes, heritage recovery strategies may not address the full extent of their operating scenarios.” 

In this context, moving Tableau to Amazon Web Services (AWS) makes a lot of sense. Think about it: ACME, Inc. makes widgets. It isn’t in the business of disaster recovery and data security. That’s what AWS is for: a trusted place where data can be stored safely. It can remove ACME’s stress about disaster recovery (DR) by placing that burden on a service that specializes in those areas and automates time-consuming things like software upgrades and backups. 

A more robust DR framework with Tableau on AWS

Let’s game out what happens when disaster strikes in an on-prem situation versus using AWS. 

In an on-premises environment, there are a fixed number of machines that need to be cleaned out and reverted to a previous state, perhaps by uninstalling and reinstalling Tableau on the machines repeatedly. These machines probably have to be restarted, and there will be concerns around the operating system. All of that takes time, workforce resources, and creates uncertainty about data recovery. 

With Tableau on AWS, you eliminate a lot of what can go wrong. You get a more robust DR framework that can be deployed much easier and faster, ensuring the continuous availability of data, as well as failover potential. There are in essence no physical objects, just concepts of compute. It’s a clean slate, so you can build and deploy a new machine relatively quickly, import clean data directly to the shared cloud repository, and move users over to the new production instance without missing a beat.

Of course, the continuous operation of memory is very important to keeping Tableau up and running. Tableau on AWS operates in an optimized environment with Amazon CloudWatch monitors that can notify you of any approximation of maxing out of memory, or anything regarding operating system and server specifications. There are multiple levels of notification possible in the prevention of any performance slowdown. 

Modern Cloud Analytics with Slalom, Tableau, and AWS

At Slalom, we can assist you in implementing DR environments, as well as alternative failover and high-availability strategies. In partnership with Tableau and AWS, and as part of our Modern Cloud Analytics offering, Slalom has developed a Navigator methodology, which takes a holistic view of Tableau-to-AWS migration centered around four focus areas:

• People:
  Enable more Tableau use across businesses, faster
• Process:
  Grow adoption to thousands of users
• Insights:
  Save money now with your data
• Platform:
  Save hundreds of hours across business units by scaling to users globally

Our trilateral company approach—encompassing strategy, migration, and operations—ensures you can securely deploy and scale Tableau on the AWS Cloud with no compromise in data integrity, governance, or security.