Definition: Set of strategies and procedures for restoring critical systems and data after a catastrophic event, minimizing downtime and information loss.
— Source: NERVICO, Product Development Consultancy
What Is Disaster Recovery
Disaster Recovery (DR) is the set of policies, tools, and procedures that enable restoring technology infrastructure and data after a severe disruptive event such as a datacenter failure, cyberattack, catastrophic human error, or natural disaster. The goal is to minimize both downtime and data loss.
How It Works
A DR strategy is defined around two key metrics: RPO (Recovery Point Objective), which determines how much data loss is acceptable, and RTO (Recovery Time Objective), which establishes the maximum time to restore service. Strategies vary in cost and recovery speed: from cold backups restored in hours, to active-active multi-region architectures enabling automatic failover in seconds. AWS offers services like CloudEndure, AWS Backup, and Route 53 health checks to implement these strategies.
Key Use Cases
- Restoring critical services after a complete AWS cloud region failure
- Recovering data after a ransomware attack using immutable backups
- Automatic failover to a secondary region when availability issues are detected in the primary
- Compliance with regulatory requirements demanding documented and tested business continuity plans
Advantages and Considerations
A well-implemented DR plan protects the organization against catastrophic data and reputation losses. Cloud services have democratized access to DR strategies that were previously viable only for large corporations. The main consideration is that cost increases exponentially with more aggressive RPO and RTO targets. Conducting periodic drills to verify the plan actually works is essential.