How do you approach disaster recovery planning in a cloud-based infrastructure, and what tools do you rely on for backup and recovery?

In a cloud-based infrastructure, my approach to disaster recovery emphasizes high availability (HA) over multiple geographic locations and, where feasible, across multiple clouds. By designing the environment with HA across redundant, geographically separated sites, we eliminate the need for traditional disaster recovery plans for single-site failures; services remain accessible without interruption. For critical applications, multi-region or multi-cloud architectures provide added resilience, ensuring that even if an entire location goes down, services can fail over to another seamlessly.

In scenarios where the environment is constrained to a single location, disaster recovery planning becomes essential. For these cases, disaster recovery tools natively available on cloud platforms such as Azure are preferred, and frequent backups with a strong focus on the 3-2-1 backup rule: three copies of the data stored on two different media types, with at least one copy in a geographically separate location or different cloud platform. This approach ensures that we have reliable, accessible backups in case of a disaster affecting the primary location.

In cloud-based disaster recovery planning, start by defining a clear disaster recovery (DR) strategy that includes Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO). Leverage cloud-native tools and services such as AWS Backup, Azure Site Recovery, or Google Cloud Backup to automate and manage backups. Implement regular, automated backups and ensure they are stored in multiple locations or regions for redundancy. Conduct routine testing of your DR plan to validate that backup and recovery processes work effectively. Additionally, use monitoring and alerting tools to detect issues early and maintain a detailed documentation of the DR procedures for quick execution during an incident.