The Tool Desk
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Set recovery targets before choosing a backup or failover design
Recovery planning starts with what the business can tolerate, not with a product or storage feature. A recovery time objective (RTO) is the maximum acceptable time a service can remain unavailable after disruption. A recovery point objective (RPO) is the maximum acceptable time since the last recoverable point—in practical terms, how much recent data the organization can afford to lose. AWS explains these recovery objectives, and Google Cloud describes their role in disaster recovery planning.
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Business owners should set the targets for each workload; technical teams then choose and test an architecture that can meet them. A customer-facing service, a reporting system, and an internal archive may have different acceptable downtime and data loss. Include dependencies such as identity, networking, databases, DNS, and third-party services: a restored application may still be unusable if a required dependency is unavailable. Recovery cost and the team’s ability to operate the design also matter. AWS recommends planning recovery around business requirements and workload dependencies.
- Write each workload’s RTO and RPO in measurable terms, and identify who approved them.
- Map which systems and services must be available before the workload can operate.
- Decide who can declare a disaster, authorize recovery, and prioritize workloads if recovery capacity is limited.
- Compare the objectives with the costs and operational effort of maintaining a recovery environment.
Choose a recovery pattern that fits the objectives
Backup-and-restore, pilot light, warm standby, and multi-region active-active are common patterns in AWS’s disaster-recovery guidance. They generally trade increasing cost and operational complexity for faster recovery and smaller recovery-point gaps. The figures below are AWS’s illustrative guidance for these patterns—not guarantees, measured industry averages, or promises for every workload. Actual results depend on the architecture and must be verified in testing. See AWS recovery strategy guidance.
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| Pattern | Illustrative AWS RTO and RPO | What it means operationally |
|---|---|---|
| Backup and restore | AWS guidance gives an RPO in hours and an RTO of 24 hours or less; these are indicative examples, not guaranteed targets. | Restore data and rebuild the service when needed. This can suit workloads that tolerate longer downtime, but recovery depends on having usable backups, configuration, software, and capacity ready. |
| Pilot light | AWS guidance gives an RPO in minutes and an RTO in tens of minutes; these are indicative examples, not guaranteed targets. | Keep the essential components ready in the recovery location, then scale or provision the remaining resources during recovery. |
| Warm standby | AWS guidance gives an RPO in seconds and an RTO in minutes; these are indicative examples, not guaranteed targets. | Maintain a reduced but functioning version of the workload that can be scaled up during a disruption. |
| Multi-region active-active | AWS guidance describes near-zero RPO and potentially zero RTO; these are illustrative possibilities, not guaranteed targets. | Run the workload in multiple locations and route traffic between them. This approach can reduce interruption, but requires more complex design and operations. |
Compare proposals on more than a headline recovery time. Check the expected RTO and RPO for the same workload and failure scenario, the cost of maintaining recovery capacity, failover complexity, dependencies, capacity at the recovery site, and whether recovery depends on a provider control plane that could also be affected. Confirm that the target location supports the required services and that the recovery team can access the systems and credentials it needs. AWS orders its patterns by increasing cost and complexity and generally faster recovery, but a particular implementation may differ; test the architecture you intend to use.
Keep everything needed to rebuild outside the failed site
A backup of application data is only one part of recovery. The recovery location also needs a way to recreate infrastructure and deploy application code, plus the configuration, access paths, and procedures needed to bring the service back. AWS’s recovery guidance describes deploying infrastructure and code and restoring backed-up data in a recovery Region. NIST describes contingency planning as a coordinated strategy of plans, procedures, and technical measures for recovering systems, operations, and data after disruption, including recovery at an alternate location. See AWS recovery strategies and NIST contingency planning.
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- Data: Identify the datasets and databases that must be restored, their backup schedules, retention, and recovery points.
- Application and infrastructure: Maintain the code, deployment configuration, and infrastructure definitions required to rebuild the service.
- Access and operations: Document how authorized responders reach the recovery environment and perform the recovery steps. Keep essential procedures and access arrangements usable if the primary facility is unavailable.
- Capacity and dependencies: Confirm the recovery site can run the workload and its prerequisites, in the order your runbook requires.
Cloud recovery can make a separate recovery location practical, but it does not automatically create a recoverable service. The design still has to address data copies, compatible services and configurations, available capacity, access, and the steps for restoring dependencies. Cloud capabilities, regional availability, costs, and legal requirements vary, so confirm them for the workload and jurisdiction.
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Use backups as well as replication
Replication can keep data synchronized between locations and support failover, but it may also copy an accidental deletion, corruption, or destructive change. AWS notes that replication alone does not protect against corruption or destruction unless point-in-time recovery is available. Keep recovery points that let you select a known-good state rather than assuming the latest synchronized copy is safe.
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For critical data, CISA recommends offline, encrypted backups and regular testing of their availability and integrity in a disaster-recovery scenario. Offline backup is a protection principle, not a recommendation for one particular medium. LTO cartridges are one possible offline medium, but choose any medium based on recovery speed, retention, capacity, and compatibility with the equipment and software needed to restore it. See the CISA #StopRansomware Guide.
Follow a recovery sequence that distinguishes outage from compromise
A facility outage, a cloud infrastructure failure, data corruption, and a destructive cyber incident can require different recovery decisions. Establish which event occurred before choosing a recovery point: when corruption or malicious activity is suspected, blindly restoring the latest replicated state could reintroduce the problem. Tailor the runbook to the workload and use the following sequence as its operational backbone.
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- Declare and scope the incident. Identify affected facilities, systems, and datasets. Determine whether the event is an infrastructure outage alone or may also involve corrupted or compromised data.
- Select the recovery location and priority. Use the plan to choose the alternate site or region and decide which workloads to recover first.
- Re-establish the environment. Deploy the required infrastructure and application components using the maintained configuration and procedures.
- Choose a known-good recovery point. Check the available restore points against the incident timeline. If corruption or destructive activity is suspected, do not assume the most recent replica is clean.
- Restore data and dependencies in order. Follow the workload’s dependency sequence, then validate data integrity before returning the service to users.
- Resume service and monitor it. Confirm the service works in the recovery environment and watch for errors or signs that the incident’s cause remains active.
- Record actual recovery results. Measure elapsed restoration time and the age of the restored data, then compare both with the workload’s RTO and RPO.
Test the restore, not just the backup job
A successful backup task does not by itself prove that a service can be recovered. Test that the required copies are available, that data can be restored and is intact, and that the complete workload can operate from the recovery location. Google Cloud recommends judging recovery tests by three criteria: data integrity, achieved RTO, and achieved RPO. Its recovery-testing guidance provides this framework.
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