Cloud disaster recovery has moved from experimental to mainstream in enterprise IT strategy. The economics of cloud infrastructure — pay-per-use compute, virtually unlimited storage, and global data center presence — make it possible for organizations of virtually any size to maintain a geographically distributed recovery capability.
The fundamental principle of cloud DR: replicate critical workload data to a cloud region, and when a disaster affects the primary data center, failover compute workloads to run against the replicated data. Recovery time depends on how warm the cloud environment is kept — pre-staged virtual machines can reduce recovery to minutes.
Hybrid cloud DR architectures address the latency and cost challenges of cloud-only recovery. cloud disaster recovery provides the on-premises recovery tier for workloads with the most aggressive RTO targets — those where recovery from cloud storage would take too long or where network bandwidth constraints limit data retrieval speed.
The cost model for cloud DR requires careful planning. Warm standby environments provide the fastest RTO but incur continuous compute costs. Cold standby reduces ongoing costs significantly but extends recovery time. Organizations must define RTO requirements precisely before committing to a cloud DR architecture.
Network connectivity is the element most frequently underestimated. During an actual disaster, internet bandwidth to the cloud region becomes a critical resource. Organizations that have not tested the full failover scenario frequently discover that network bottlenecks extend effective recovery time beyond theoretical estimates.
Regulatory compliance adds complexity, particularly for organizations subject to data residency requirements. GDPR, healthcare regulations, and financial services frameworks impose restrictions on where data can be stored and replicated. Cloud DR designs must map each workload's regulatory classification against available cloud regions to ensure compliance.
