Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity in the Cloud

Outages are inevitable—but how you respond determines business survival. This chapter lays out the strategic and technical foundations of cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity planning (BCP). Readers will learn how cloud changes traditional DR assumptions, introducing options like pilot light, warm standby, and active–active failover strategies that support faster recovery and geographic resilience. It emphasizes aligning DR plans with business impact analyses (BIAs), recovery time objectives (RTOs), and recovery point objectives (RPOs) to ensure continuity without overprovisioning. The chapter also explores automation and testing as critical components of any effective DR strategy. Topics include backup validation, regional failover, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) recovery workflows, and crisis management coordination. Readers will discover how to integrate DR into broader operational resilience efforts and how cloud-native tooling simplifies versioning, replication, and failback procedures. By the end, they'll understand how to build DR and BCP strategies that are not only technically sound but also aligned with executive priorities and regulatory expectations—ensuring that service interruptions don't become existential risks.