Cloud Disaster Recovery You Have Actually Tested

A backup is a copy of data. Disaster recovery is the ability to run your business from somewhere else within an agreed time. DR includes the recovery environment, network and identity configuration, the order in which systems come back, and the people and decisions around declaring an incident. Backups are a component of DR, not a substitute for it.

It depends on the pattern you fund. Backup and restore typically gives an RTO of hours and an RPO of up to 24 hours. Pilot light brings RTO to tens of minutes. Warm standby reaches single-digit minutes, and active-active approaches near-zero for both. We map each application tier to a pattern so you are not paying active-active prices for a workload that can tolerate four hours.

At minimum annually for full failover, and quarterly for component-level and runbook validation. We also recommend a test after any significant architecture change. Most real DR failures trace back to drift between what the runbook says and what production actually looks like.

Only if the recovery copies are isolated and immutable. If your backups sit in the same account with the same credentials, an attacker deletes them too. We use immutable retention, separate accounts and separate credentials, plus a documented clean-room rebuild process so you do not restore the compromise along with the data.

No. A cloud recovery region gives you geographic separation without a second physical site, and pilot light or warm standby patterns mean you only pay for full capacity during an actual event or a test.

Yes. Hybrid DR — replicating on-premises or colocated workloads into a cloud recovery environment — is one of the most common configurations we run, and it is often the cheapest way to retire a secondary data centre.