Case Study: Development Guild DDI achieves sub-20-minute disaster recovery and reduced costs with Unitrends Boomerang (Unitrends)

Using AWS Virtual Private Cloud to Protect Local Servers

Development Guild DDI is a Boston- and New York–based professional consulting firm focused on academic medicine, higher education, arts and culture and human services. With IT Director Daniel Coffin overseeing systems, the firm faced backup challenges: half their infrastructure already ran in an AWS VPC but their legacy Symantec/Dell solution couldn’t produce full image backups or efficiently replicate local VMs to the cloud, with recovery processes taking more than six hours.

They deployed Unitrends Boomerang to replicate on‑premises VMs to inexpensive AWS S3 and use a Pilot Light feature to auto-convert replicas to native AMIs and spin them up in EC2 when needed—without running costly always‑on instances. The result: disaster recovery time dropped from over six hours to under 20 minutes, costs were reduced, and the team gained easier management, better automation, and scalable, ransomware‑resilient protection.

Development Guild DDI

Daniel Coffin

IT Director