Disaster Recovery Planning

Define disaster scope and priorities

Distinguish routine component failure from a disaster that requires a separate recovery mode. Scenarios can include a regional outage, destructive operator action, ransomware, lost cloud-account control, corrupted data, or a critical provider dependency unavailable for a prolonged period. Each scenario removes different tools and may require different recovery points.

Work with business owners to rank user journeys and establish recovery time and recovery point objectives. Identify minimum viable service during recovery, including manual alternatives and features that can remain disabled. Recovery order follows dependencies: identity, network, keys, data, shared platforms, applications, and external integrations often need deliberate sequencing.

Choose a recovery pattern

Backup and restore has lower standing cost but longer recovery. Pilot-light designs keep core data or services ready and rebuild the rest. Warm standby runs reduced capacity that scales during recovery. Multi-site operation keeps substantial capacity active in more than one location and demands the most continuous coordination. Select from objectives and tested capability.

A second Region is not automatically a recovery system. Code, images, state, network ranges, certificates, DNS, identity, quotas, configuration, backups, keys, monitoring, and support access must all be available. Data replication can reduce loss but can also copy corruption, so retain protected recovery points independent from live replication.

Write an operator-ready runbook

Name the incident commander, disaster declaration authority, technical leads, communications owner, and business decision makers. Define how they communicate if normal chat, identity, or laptops are unavailable. Store a protected offline or cross-account copy of contacts, architecture, access procedures, vendor details, and the runbook itself.

Write verifiable steps with inputs, expected results, decision points, and rollback or pause conditions. Include account and Region checks before mutations. Recovery should avoid making an uncertain situation worse. For suspected compromise, preserve evidence, rotate access through the incident process, and restore only after security owners approve the recovery source and environment.

Exercise and improve the plan

Use escalating exercises: discussion walkthroughs, isolated component restores, dependency simulations, and controlled regional recovery tests. State which production systems are out of scope and use synthetic traffic where possible. Notify participants, define stop conditions, and never create a real outage merely to make the exercise realistic.

Measure declaration time, access time, infrastructure provisioning, data restoration, application validation, traffic shift, and communication. Compare achieved outcomes with objectives. Track every missing permission, stale instruction, quota, manual value, and ambiguous owner to closure. Repeat after major architecture and staffing changes, not only on a calendar.

Plan regional recovery for a learning service

A service can tolerate four hours of interruption and thirty minutes of new progress loss during a regional outage.

1. Prioritize login, course reading, and progress writes, while marking analytics and recommendations as deferrable during recovery.
2. Prepare infrastructure code, images, configuration, quotas, identity, keys, monitoring, and protected database recovery points in the recovery Region.
3. Write declaration, restore, validation, and DNS traffic steps with exact owners, destination checks, communication channels, and stop conditions.
4. Run an isolated exercise using synthetic users, measure each stage, and correct the permissions and data replay steps that exceed the objectives.

Disaster recovery service sheet

Create one sheet for each recovery-priority service and connect it to the incident command plan.

• Business journey, priority, minimum viable mode, recovery time, recovery point, and decision owner.
• Scenarios, dependencies, recovery pattern, capacity, quotas, and unavailable-boundary assumptions.
• Code, artifact, infrastructure, state, data, keys, configuration, identity, DNS, and monitoring locations.
• Declaration, communications, access, restoration order, validation, traffic shift, and security approval.
• Exercise scope, stop conditions, stage timings, defects, remediation owner, and next trigger.

Common mistakes

• Documenting a recovery Region without verifying quotas, keys, images, and access there.
• Keeping the only runbook and emergency credentials inside the identity boundary the scenario assumes is unavailable.
• Calling a tabletop discussion proof that data restoration and traffic switching meet the stated time objective.

Try one

Sources

• AWS Well-Architected Reliability PillarOfficial AWS design principles and practices for reliable workloads and recovery planning.
• AWS Backup documentationOfficial AWS overview of policy-based backup management, recovery points, and restore testing.