Disaster Recovery Orchestrator provides monitoring capabilities for the applications running in an organization's IT environment. The on-premises systems on which these applications are deployed can be physical computers or virtual machines that are managed in a virtualization environment. Any virtualization platform may be used at the on-premises site. In the AWS cloud environment, the applications are deployed on Amazon EC2 instances.

Disaster Recovery Orchestrator employs an agent framework to monitor the state of applications and their dependent components. Specific agents are available to monitor the application, storage, and network components. Together, these agents monitor the overall health of the configured applications by running specific commands, tests, or scripts.

Disaster Recovery Orchestrator is based on Symantec Cluster Server (VCS), and uses similar concepts such as agents, resources, and service groups to provide application monitoring. Disaster Recovery Orchestrator has a lightweight server footprint that allows faster installation and configuration.

When the Disaster Recovery Orchestrator solution is in place, the Amazon cloud acts as a DR site for the applications that run at the on-premises site. In the event of a disaster, you can continue servicing your clients through the applications running in the cloud. Later, you can resume application processing at the on-premises site when it is functional again. Even when the on-premises site is fully operational, you can perform a fire drill to test the DR readiness of the configuration.