Data Backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) are critical components of any business continuity plan. Backup refers to the process of copying and storing data so it can be restored. DR is the broader strategy for restoring full business operations after a disruptive event, whether a ransomware attack, accidental deletion, infrastructure failure, or natural disaster.
Key Takeaways
- ✓RPO defines how much data you can afford to lose; RTO defines how long you can afford to be down. Both must be agreed before choosing a DR strategy.
- ✓AWS supports four DR tiers: Backup and Restore, Pilot Light, Warm Standby, and Multi-Site Active/Active.
- ✓AWS Backup provides centralised, policy-driven management across S3, RDS, EC2, EFS, DynamoDB, and more.
- ✓Backups must be in a separate region and ideally a separate account — same-region backups are vulnerable to regional failures.
- ✓A backup you have never tested is not a backup — test restoration quarterly and DR failover at least annually.
RPO, Recovery Point Objective
The maximum acceptable data loss measured in time. An RPO of 1 hour means your backup strategy must be capable of restoring data from no more than 1 hour ago.
RTO, Recovery Time Objective
The maximum acceptable time between a disaster and full restoration of business operations. Your DR strategy must be designed to meet this target.
AWS Backup Services
Amazon S3
The foundation of AWS backup storage. 11 nines (99.999999999%) of data durability, encryption at rest and in transit, cross-region replication, and Object Lock for immutable backup storage. Multiple storage classes enable cost-effective long-term retention.
Amazon RDS Automated Backups
Automatic daily backups of your database instances with point-in-time recovery for any moment within your configured retention window (up to 35 days). Manual snapshots can be retained indefinitely and copied across regions.
Amazon EBS Snapshots
Incremental snapshots of EC2 instance volumes, only changed blocks are stored, minimising backup storage costs. Snapshots can be automated through Amazon Data Lifecycle Manager (DLM) with customisable schedules and retention policies.
AWS Backup
Centralised, policy-driven backup management across S3, RDS, EC2, EFS, DynamoDB, Aurora, DocumentDB, and more. Provides a unified audit trail and compliance reports, essential for regulatory frameworks like ISO 27001 and SOC 2. The AWS Backup documentation covers supported resource types and compliance report generation.
The AWS Backup documentation covers supported resource types and compliance report generation.
Disaster Recovery Strategies
AWS supports four DR strategies, each offering a different balance of cost, RTO, and RPO. Most organisations implement different strategies for different application tiers based on their criticality. AWS published a detailed disaster recovery guide covering all four strategies with architecture diagrams.
Backup & Restore
The most cost-effective approach. Data is backed up to S3 or Glacier. Recovery requires restoring and launching resources from backup, suitable for non-critical workloads.
Pilot Light
Core infrastructure is always running in AWS at minimal scale. During a disaster, resources are scaled up rapidly. Suitable for tier 2 applications where some recovery time is acceptable.
Warm Standby
A fully functional but scaled-down replica runs continuously. On failover, it scales to full production capacity. Suitable for business-critical applications.
Multi-Site Active/Active
Traffic is distributed across multiple AWS regions simultaneously. Failover is instant and transparent to users. Required for mission-critical, zero-downtime applications.
Implementation Tip
Most organisations should implement tiered DR, Warm Standby for critical applications, Backup & Restore for development and test environments. This balances business continuity requirements with cost discipline. Always test your DR procedures at least annually with documented runbooks.
Cross-Region and Cross-Account Resilience
A DR strategy that keeps backups in the same AWS region as the production environment is vulnerable to region-wide disruptions. AWS best practice recommends maintaining copies in a separate region, and ideally a separate AWS account, to protect against both regional failures and accidental or malicious deletion.
AWS Backup supports cross-region and cross-account backup copies, and Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication automates replication of S3 objects to a bucket in a different region as objects are written.
“A backup you’ve never tested is not a backup, it’s a hope.”
Test your restore procedures regularly, document your DR runbooks, and validate your RTO and RPO assumptions before an incident forces you to.
Frequently Asked Questions
RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is the maximum acceptable data loss measured in time. An RPO of 1 hour means your strategy must restore data from no more than 1 hour before the incident. RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is the maximum acceptable downtime. Your DR architecture must reliably meet both targets under real failure conditions, which is why testing matters.
Test backup restoration at least quarterly. Test full DR failover at least annually with documented results. ISO 27001 and SOC 2 both require evidence of tested DR procedures. AWS Resilience Hub can automate resilience assessment and simulate failure scenarios without touching production workloads.
Backup and Restore is the cheapest option — backups sit in S3 or Glacier with no standby infrastructure running. Recovery takes hours, making it suitable only for non-critical workloads. S3 Glacier Deep Archive at approximately $0.00099 per GB per month is the cheapest storage option for long-term archives accessed less than once per year.
Yes. AWS Backup supports cross-account and cross-region backup copies natively. This is essential for resilience — storing backups only in the same region as production means a single regional event can take down both. AWS recommends keeping backup copies in a separate account in a different region as a minimum standard for business-critical data.
