How Cloud Disaster Recovery Works

Author

Govardhana M K
July 05, 2025

TechOps Examples

Hey — It's Govardhana MK 👋

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🧠 DEEP DIVE USE CASE

How Cloud Disaster Recovery Works

Any disaster recovery setup starts with two things: RTO and RPO.

All design decisions like backups, failover systems, cost, and complexity depend on these two parameters. Ideally, your business goals decide what values are acceptable.

RPO (Recovery Point Objective): How much data can you afford to lose?

If your last good backup was 30 minutes ago, and you're okay losing that much data, your RPO is 30 minutes.

RTO (Recovery Time Objective): How quickly should everything be back up and running?

If you can tolerate 1 hour of downtime before things break badly, then your RTO is 1 hour.

With RTO and RPO defined, let’s look at the most common disaster recovery patterns you would find in the real world:

  1. Backup and Restore

  2. Pilot Light

  3. Warm Standby

  4. Multi Site

1. Backup and Restore

This is the simplest to understand and the most widely used pattern for disaster recovery in cost sensitive environments.

Typical RTO: Several hours to days

Typical RPO: Can vary from several hours to the last successful backup

You create regular backups of your data and systems. These backups are stored in durable storage like Amazon S3. Many teams use lifecycle policies to automatically move older backups to cheaper storage classes like Glacier or Deep Archive.

When a disaster occurs, you restore everything from these backups. That includes spinning up EC2 instances, restoring RDS snapshots, applying infrastructure configurations, and syncing application data.

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This pattern involves no active infrastructure. Nothing runs until there is a failure.

That keeps the ongoing cost very low.

But recovery is slow and depends heavily on your process discipline.

For example, if you only back up application data but forget things like VPC configurations, IAM roles, or load balancer settings, your restore will break.

In AWS, this often means rebuilding networking and permissions from scratch before your app is even reachable.

Also, restoring large datasets can take time depending on your storage class. Glacier Deep Archive, for instance, can take up to 12 hours to retrieve backup files.

This approach is commonly used for internal tools, dev environments, or workloads where occasional downtime is acceptable.

2. Pilot Light

In many real world DR designs, Pilot Light is the stage where teams begin balancing recovery speed with cost. You keep only the essential components running, and spin up the rest when a disaster occurs.

Typical RTO: Minutes to a few hours

Typical RPO: Depends on how frequently data is synchronized

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