Cloud Disaster Recovery

Cloud disaster recovery typically costs 40-70% less than traditional approaches. Traditional DR requires duplicate infrastructure, data center space, and ongoing maintenance, often $50,000-200,000 annually for small to medium businesses. Cloud DR uses pay-as-you-go pricing, with typical costs of $2,000-10,000 monthly depending on data volume, RTO/RPO requirements, and compute needs. You only pay for storage and minimal compute until failover is needed, eliminating costs of maintaining idle standby infrastructure. Most businesses achieve full DR capability at 30-60% of traditional costs.

Cloud backup protects data; cloud disaster recovery protects entire operations. Backup allows you to restore files and databases, but recovery still requires rebuilding servers, reinstalling applications, and reconfiguring systems, potentially taking days. Cloud DR maintains ready-to-run copies of your complete environment in the cloud. When disaster strikes, you failover to running systems in minutes or hours, not days. Think of backup as your safety net for data; DR is your complete business continuity solution enabling rapid operational recovery.

Recovery speed depends on your Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and solution design. Warm standby solutions (systems ready but not running) enable recovery in 1-4 hours. Hot standby solutions (systems already running in parallel) enable recovery in minutes through automated failover. Cold standby solutions (infrastructure defined but not deployed) require 4-12 hours for recovery. We design cloud DR solutions matching your RTO requirements: faster recovery costs more, but even basic cloud DR delivers 70-90% faster recovery than traditional approaches at lower total cost.

Yes, properly designed cloud disaster recovery provides excellent ransomware protection through immutable backups and isolated recovery environments. Your DR environment operates in isolated cloud infrastructure that ransomware can't access from your production systems. Immutable snapshots prevent ransomware from encrypting backup data. When ransomware strikes, you fail over to your clean DR environment, restoring operations while you clean production systems. The key is proper isolation:DR infrastructure must be segmented from production to prevent ransomware spread.

Test cloud disaster recovery quarterly at minimum, with annual full failover tests. Quarterly tests should validate data replication, verify recent changes are properly replicated, test recovery of sample systems, and confirm team familiarity with procedures. Annual comprehensive tests should include complete failover to DR environment, validation that all critical applications work correctly, verification of network connectivity and performance, and documentation of recovery time actuals vs. objectives. Regular testing identifies issues before real disasters and builds team confidence in recovery procedures.