In this section, we discuss how AWS can be leveraged for your on-premise and cloud-based application’s disaster recovery. We present several different DR strategies that may be suitable for different types of applications, budgets, and situations.
Disaster recovery scenarios typically include hardware or software failures, network outages, power outages, natural disasters like floods, or other such significant events that directly impact a company’s ability to continue with their business. Traditionally, there have been two key metrics driving the implementation of disaster recovery strategies—Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the time it takes to restore the business process (after a disaster) to its service level.
Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the acceptable amount of data loss measured in time units.
Depending on your RTO and RPO objectives, there are several architectural strategies available to recover from disasters. The main ones in the order of reducing RTO/RPO (but with higher associated costs) are described in the following sections.