Cloud Computing
Disaster Recovery
Definition
Disaster Recovery (DR) involves a set of policies, tools, and procedures to enable the recovery or continuation of vital technology infrastructure and systems following a natural or human-induced disaster.
Why It Matters
DR is crucial for business continuity. Having a DR plan ensures that a business can recover its IT systems and data and resume operations quickly after a catastrophic event, minimizing financial loss and reputational damage.
Contextual Example
A common cloud DR strategy is "Pilot Light." A minimal version of the application environment is kept running in a secondary cloud region. In a disaster, this pilot light is "lit" and scaled up to a full production environment to take over the workload.
Common Misunderstandings
- Disaster recovery is different from high availability. High availability is about preventing downtime from small failures within a single site, while disaster recovery is about recovering from a large-scale disaster that takes out an entire site or region.
- Cloud providers make DR easier and more affordable by providing multiple geographic regions and tools for data replication.