Backup & Disaster Recovery

You Don’t Have a Backup Strategy Until You’ve Tested a Recovery

Every company backs up their data. Far fewer can actually restore it under pressure.

The difference between a backup strategy and a real disaster recovery capability is like having insurance paperwork versus knowing the claims process actually works. When an outage, data corruption event, or regional failure hits, only two things matter: how fast you get back to a working state, and whether the data you recover is complete.

AWS gives you the building blocks for world-class data protection. But building blocks without a design are just a pile of services. We help you turn them into a tested, documented recovery capability your team can execute with confidence.

Common Problems We Solve

Most teams we work with have some form of backup in place. The gaps are in coverage, consistency, and recoverability:

• Backups exist, but nobody has tested a restore. Snapshots and copies run on schedule, but your team has never actually recovered a full environment from them. The first real test happens during the worst possible moment — an actual incident.
• RPO and RTO are undefined. The business hasn’t specified how much data loss is acceptable (Recovery Point Objective) or how long an outage can last (Recovery Time Objective). Without these numbers, your backup strategy is based on guesswork.
• Inconsistent backup coverage. Some databases are backed up automatically. Some application data lives on EBS volumes with no snapshots. Configuration files, secrets, and infrastructure definitions? Not backed up at all.
• No cross-region protection. All backups live in the same region as the primary workload. A regional outage takes out both your production environment and your ability to recover it.
• Retention policies are either missing or wrong. Some teams keep everything forever, driving up storage costs for no reason. Others don’t keep backups long enough to meet compliance or operational requirements.
• Manual recovery processes. When a restore is needed, senior engineers have to piece together the steps from memory. No runbook, no automation, no defined chain of command.
• Disaster recovery plans that exist only on paper. The plan was written once for a compliance checkbox but never exercised. The infrastructure has changed significantly since then, and the documented procedures no longer match reality.

Our Approach

We treat backup and disaster recovery as a continuous capability, not a one-time configuration. The goal is a system your team can operate, test, and evolve as your infrastructure changes.

RPO/RTO Definition Workshop

Everything starts with the business requirements. We sit down with your stakeholders — not just engineering, but leadership, operations, and compliance — to define Recovery Point Objectives and Recovery Time Objectives for each critical workload. These aren’t arbitrary numbers. They’re informed by the actual cost of downtime and data loss to your business.

Different workloads get different targets. A customer-facing transaction database might need an RPO of minutes and an RTO of under an hour. An internal analytics platform might tolerate hours of data loss and a full day of downtime. Applying the same protection level to everything either overspends on low-priority systems or underprotects critical ones.

Backup Architecture Design

With RPO and RTO targets locked in, we design a backup architecture that meets them. That means selecting the right AWS services for each workload, configuring backup schedules and retention policies, and setting up cross-region replication where your recovery targets demand it.

For databases, we configure automated snapshots, point-in-time recovery, and cross-region read replicas where near-zero RPO is required. For file and object storage, we implement S3 Cross-Region Replication with AI-driven storage class optimization through S3 Intelligent-Tiering, which automatically moves data between access tiers based on observed usage patterns. For full-environment recovery, we design infrastructure-as-code templates that can rebuild your entire stack in a secondary region.

We also tackle the pieces that get overlooked constantly: secrets and encryption keys, DNS configurations, IAM roles and policies, and application configuration. A database restore is useless if the application can’t connect to it because the credentials, network routes, or DNS records weren’t also recovered.

Cross-Region Replication and Failover

For teams that need to survive a full regional outage, we design and implement multi-region disaster recovery architectures. The approach scales with your RTO requirements:

• Backup and restore — data is replicated cross-region; infrastructure is rebuilt from code during a disaster event (hours-scale RTO)
• Pilot light — core infrastructure runs in the secondary region at minimal scale; full capacity is provisioned during failover (tens-of-minutes-scale RTO)
• Warm standby — a scaled-down copy of the full environment runs in the secondary region and can be scaled up quickly (minutes-scale RTO)

We implement the pattern that matches your recovery targets and budget, with clear documentation on the trade-offs between cost and recovery speed.

Recovery Testing

A disaster recovery plan you haven’t tested is just a hypothesis. We design and run recovery tests — from individual database restores to full-environment failovers — to validate that your backups are usable, your runbooks are accurate, and your team can execute the recovery within the defined RTO.

We recommend quarterly recovery tests at minimum, with full failover exercises at least annually. Every test is documented with results, issues found, and improvements to make.

What You Get

• RPO/RTO matrix — documented recovery targets for each critical workload, aligned with business impact analysis
• Backup architecture design — service selection, schedules, retention policies, and cross-region replication configuration for every protected workload
• AWS Backup policy configuration — centralized backup plans, vault configurations, and lifecycle rules implemented and tested
• Disaster recovery runbooks — step-by-step procedures for every recovery scenario, from single-resource restore to full regional failover
• Recovery test plan and results — a structured testing schedule with documented outcomes from the initial validation exercise
• Monitoring and alerting — CloudWatch alarms for backup job failures, replication lag, and vault compliance, so your team knows immediately when protection lapses

AWS Services We Use

• AWS Backup — centralized, policy-driven backup management across AWS services
• Amazon S3 Cross-Region Replication — automatic object replication for durable, geographically distributed data protection
• Amazon RDS automated snapshots and point-in-time recovery — database-level backup with granular restore capabilities
• AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery — continuous block-level replication for rapid server recovery in a secondary region
• Amazon S3 Glacier and Glacier Deep Archive — cost-effective long-term retention for compliance and archival backups
• AWS CloudFormation — infrastructure-as-code templates enabling full environment rebuild in any region