Operations & Cloud / 2026 Essentials
Choose a Recovery Strategy Before You Need It
Match your disaster recovery design to business recovery objectives and available resources.
Disaster recovery is a design decision, not just a collection of backup files. AWS describes strategies ranging from backup-and-restore to standby and active-active arrangements. Each offers different recovery characteristics, operating costs, and complexity. The appropriate choice depends on what the business can tolerate.
What matters
- Agree how much data loss and downtime each workload can accept.
- Include application dependencies, identities, and configuration in the recovery design.
- Exercise the chosen strategy and compare measured recovery with the stated objectives.
Practical example: A non-critical archive can use backup-and-restore, while an essential ordering service may justify a faster standby approach.
One action today: Choose one service and document its recovery strategy, dependencies, and test owner.