If the cloud goes down, your business doesn't.
Even AWS and Azure have outages. Sometimes for hours. If your business runs on cloud and you haven't designed for cloud-going-down, you don't have a backup strategy — you have a hope. We build real disaster-recovery architectures: multi-region, multi-zone, tested twice a year.
When cloud-only backup isn't enough.
AWS us-east-1 went out for 6 hours.
Our entire stack ran there. So did our backups. So did our DNS. So did our monitoring. So did us.
Snapshot is in the same account that got compromised.
Attacker has admin. They delete the snapshots before the encryption sweep. Now there's nothing.
We have backups. Never tested the restore.
Day-of-disaster is not the time to learn the restore process doesn't actually work.
RTO and RPO are aspirational, not real.
Plan says 4-hour recovery. Last time it took two days. Plan never updated.
What we design.
- 01
Multi-region replication
Critical workloads replicate to a second region. Failover tested. RTO under 1 hour for tier-1 systems.
- 02
Cross-account backups
Backups stored in a separate AWS account or Azure subscription. Compromised primary → backups untouched.
- 03
Immutable + air-gapped
Object lock or immutable vault. Even an admin can't delete the backup before its retention expires.
- 04
Bi-annual DR drills
Twice a year we fail over to the secondary region for real. Documented runbook, every step verified.
- 05
RTO + RPO commitments
Real numbers based on tested recovery, not best-case math. Per workload tier.
- 06
Written runbook
Step-by-step what to do, who to call, how to know it worked. Updated after every drill.
Four levels of cloud DR.
Most firms are at level 2 and think they're at level 4.
| Backup only | Multi-AZ | Multi-region | Active-active | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Survives instance failure | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Survives data-center failure | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Survives region failure | No | No | Yes (failover) | Yes (transparent) |
| Survives account compromise | Maybe | Maybe | Yes (cross-account) | Yes |
| Typical recovery time | Hours–days | Minutes | 30–60 minutes | Seconds |
| Cost overhead | Lowest | +10–20% | +30–60% | +80–120% |
| Best for | Dev / test | Most workloads | Revenue-critical | Mission-critical |
Cloud backup + DR platforms.
What we measure.
Recovery time objective for revenue-critical workloads. Tested, not estimated.
Recovery point — maximum data loss in a region-failover scenario.
Twice a year. Real failover. Documented.
In the last 5 years. We don't move on until the drill passes.
“When us-east-1 went out last year, half of our competitors were down for the whole afternoon. We failed over to us-west-2 in 47 minutes. Senator's design held up — and the DR drills we did six months earlier meant we knew exactly what to do.”
Who needs this.
- Cloud-native firms with revenue-critical applications.
- Anyone whose SOC 2 audit includes availability commitments.
- Healthcare and financial firms with regulator-mandated continuity plans.
- Firms with cyber-insurance requirements that include tested DR.
Q01Isn't 'multi-AZ' enough?
Isn't 'multi-AZ' enough?
For most workloads, yes. But for revenue-critical systems, AZ-level redundancy doesn't help when an entire region has an outage — and those do happen, every couple of years.
Q02What does multi-region typically cost?
What does multi-region typically cost?
30–60% premium over single-region for the replicated workloads. Cheaper than the cost of an actual region-level outage for any serious business.
Q03How often should we drill?
How often should we drill?
Twice a year is our standard. Annual minimum for compliance. Quarterly for the most critical environments.
Q04What about multi-cloud DR?
What about multi-cloud DR?
Possible but expensive and complex. We rarely recommend it unless there's a regulatory or strategic reason. Multi-region within one cloud is usually the right answer.
Free DR readiness assessment.
We review your current architecture, identify the single points of failure, and propose what tier of DR makes sense per workload. Written report in 5 business days.