DataTerminology.comNEW
Also known as: DR
Strategies, policies, and procedures to restore systems and data following disruptive incidents or regional outages.
DESCRIPTION
Disaster recovery ensures critical workloads can be restored after catastrophic events. It defines objectives (RPO, RTO), replication, backups, and tested runbooks for failover and failback. DR complements high availability by addressing larger-scale failures beyond component redundancy. Approaches include backup-and-restore, pilot light, warm standby, and active-active. Automation, infrastructure as code, and observability improve repeatability and speed. Plans must respect data residency, security, and compliance requirements. Regular exercises validate effectiveness and expose gaps. Cost and complexity scale with tighter objectives and wider geographic protection.
ALTERNATIVE DEFINITIONS
Wikipedia
Disaster recovery 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.
Broadly frames DR as policies, tools, and procedures for IT recovery.
NIST
A disaster recovery plan (DRP) provides procedures for relocating information systems operations to an alternate location, restoring lost data, and resuming system operations.
Prescriptive government guidance emphasizing procedures and alternate sites.
AWS Well-Architected
Disaster recovery (DR) consists of the plans, policies, procedures, and infrastructure to restore your workload after a disruption.
Integrates plans, policies, and infrastructure for cloud workloads.
RELATED TERMS
Business Continuity Backup and Restore Recovery Point Objective Recovery Time Objective Runbook Failover Incident Response Multi-Region Replication Chaos Engineering
COMPETING TERMS
RELATIONS
- Narrower: High Availability and Disaster Recovery
KNOWLEDGE AREAS
Data Management Data Architecture Cloud Infrastructure Data Storage & Operations
TARGET AUDIENCE
Cloud Architect DevOps Engineer Data Architect Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Data Engineer MLOps Engineer
EXTERNAL SOURCES
- Wikipedia - Disaster recovery
- AWS - Cloud DR strategies and patterns
- Microsoft - Azure resiliency framework
- Google Cloud - GCP DR scenarios and patterns
- NIST - Contingency planning standard
TOP QUESTIONS
What is the primary goal of Disaster Recovery?
To restore critical services and data within acceptable time (RTO) and data loss (RPO) thresholds after a disruptive event.
Category: Definition
How does Disaster Recovery differ from High Availability?
High Availability reduces downtime through redundancy; Disaster Recovery restores operations after large-scale or regional failures.
Category: Clarification
What are common Disaster Recovery strategies?
Backup-and-restore, pilot light, warm standby, and active-active are common, each with cost and RTO/RPO trade-offs.
Category: Overview
How often should Disaster Recovery be tested?
At least annually, and whenever architecture, dependencies, or business objectives change. Frequent smaller drills improve confidence.
Category: BestPractice
What are common mistakes in Disaster Recovery plans?
Unrehearsed runbooks, undocumented dependencies, untested DNS cutovers, and ignoring identity or secrets recovery commonly cause failures.
Category: Mistakes
How do RPO and RTO guide Disaster Recovery design?
They determine replication, backup frequency, and automation needed. Tighter objectives increase complexity and cost.
Category: Requirements
How does Data Residency influence Disaster Recovery?
It can restrict backup locations and failover targets, requiring region-constrained replication and alternative runbooks.
Category: Compliance
What metrics indicate Disaster Recovery readiness?
Measured failover time vs. RTO, replication lag affecting RPO, drill success rate, and recovery automation coverage are key signals.
Category: Observability
When should an organization update its Disaster Recovery plan?
After architecture changes, new dependencies, incidents, audits, regulatory updates, or shifts in business criticality.
Category: Governance