Every business has a single question they hope they never have to answer: what happens if our systems go down? Whether it’s a ransomware attack, an accidental database deletion, a hardware failure, or a natural disaster — downtime costs money, damages reputation, and erodes customer trust.
A well-designed Disaster Recovery (DR) plan on AWS can protect your business from all of these scenarios. At IHA Cloud, DR planning is a core part of how we architect every production environment.
Understanding RTO and RPO
Before designing a DR strategy, you need to define two critical metrics:
Recovery Time Objective (RTO): The maximum acceptable time your application can be offline after a failure. Example: “We must be back online within 4 hours.”
Recovery Point Objective (RPO): The maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time. Example: “We can afford to lose no more than 1 hour of transaction data.”
Your RTO and RPO directly determine which DR strategy is appropriate — and what it will cost.
The Four AWS DR Strategies
- Backup and Restore (Lowest Cost)
Regularly back up data to S3 or AWS Backup and restore from scratch during a disaster.
- RTO: Hours to days
- RPO: Hours
- Best for: Non-critical systems, archives, development environments
- Pilot Light
Keep a minimal version of your environment always running in a secondary region — typically just the database with replication enabled. Scale up compute during a disaster.
- RTO: 30 minutes to 2 hours
- RPO: Minutes
- Best for: Core business applications with moderate recovery requirements
- Warm Standby
Run a scaled-down but fully functional version of your environment in a secondary region at all times. Scale to full capacity during failover.
- RTO: Minutes to 30 minutes
- RPO: Seconds to minutes
- Best for: Business-critical applications that cannot tolerate long downtime
- Multi-Site Active/Active (Highest Cost)
Run full production capacity simultaneously in two or more AWS regions. Traffic is distributed between regions at all times.
- RTO: Near zero (seconds)
- RPO: Near zero
- Best for: Mission-critical platforms where any downtime is unacceptable
AWS Services for Disaster Recovery
- AWS Backup – Centralised, policy-driven backup across EC2, RDS, EFS, DynamoDB, and more
- Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication – Automatic replication of S3 objects to a secondary region
- RDS Multi-AZ and Read Replicas – Database high availability and cross-region failover
- AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (DRS) – Continuous replication of on-premise or cloud servers to AWS for fast failover
- Route 53 Health Checks – Automatic DNS failover to healthy endpoints
IHA Cloud DR Assessment and Implementation
IHA Cloud conducts a comprehensive DR Assessment that covers your current backup posture, identifies gaps, and designs a right-sized DR strategy aligned to your RTO, RPO, and budget. We then implement, test, and document your DR runbooks so your team knows exactly what to do when the unexpected happens.
