Last Thursday, AWS experienced an outage lasting about six hours. Just yesterday Azure faced a similar disruption, a powerful reminder of why cloud resilience and solid disaster recovery (DR) plans are critical for every business.
These incidents tested the disaster recovery (DR) readiness of countless organizations, and as you might expect, revealed both the true value of critical applications and the gaps in preparedness many teams face.
In many organizations, the Information Systems Security (ISS) or cybersecurity department is jokingly referred to as the “Department of No.” And thought it is one of the main factors in pulling back on innovation and rapid evolution.
The truth is quite different. Most security professionals aren’t trying to block innovation; they’re trying to ensure stability, continuity, and resilience. Security and business enablement aren’t opposites; they are partners in keeping your business running when things go wrong.
A Reality Check: How Important Is Your Application?
Every developer and manager believes their application is essential. But events like last week’s outages put that belief to the test.
When a platform goes down, you quickly discover which systems truly matter and how ready (or not) your teams are to recover them.
If your application supports a core business function, it deserves documented, tested, and regularly updated DR plans.
Do you think you are all set? You should be able to answer some key questions:
- Do we have a documented DR strategy?
- When does it activate?
- What is our Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)?
- When was the last time we tested this plan?
Too often, during cloud outages, teams freeze. Refreshing AWS or Azure status pages and waiting for the green lights to return is not a recovery strategy!
Why a DR Plan Matters
A well-prepared team should be able to redeploy a cloud-hosted application within a few hours.
Yet, during the recent outages, even teams with multiple engineers struggled to recall:
- Where the code and deployment scripts were stored
- How to trigger the deployment pipeline
- What the failover process actually looked like
- To build true cloud resilience, you must go beyond simple backups.
From a DR perspective, this represents a total breakdown. Not because the outage was catastrophic, but because the plan was missing or untested.
Laying the Groundwork for Recovery
Before crafting a complex DR strategy, every organization should first ensure they’ve mastered the fundamental components of DevOps. These are simple but critical steps that make recovery possible in any environment, and that is independent of the hosting environment (whether cloud, hybrid, or on-prem).
- Ensure Regular and Reliable Backups
Backups are your safety net.
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- Automate backups for data, configurations, and critical secrets.
- The more critical a system is the more copies we should have. Store them in a separate region or provider to avoid single points of failure.
- Test restoration periodically; a backup that hasn’t been tested might as well not exist.
- Keep Your Code in a Central, Accessible Repository
During a crisis, time spent searching for the “latest version” is time lost.
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- Use a centralized version control system (e.g., GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket).
- Clearly document deployment steps, configurations, and dependencies in the repo.
- Ensure access permissions are well-defined so the right people can act quickly when needed.
- Automate Deployments Using CI/CD and IaC
Recovery, and I would argue that even regular deployments, should never depend on one person’s memory or manual steps.
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- Use CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, or AWS CodePipeline) to automate build and deployment.
- Define your environment with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi.
- This ensures your infrastructure can be recreated quickly and consistently, a core requirement for any DR event.
By putting these building blocks in place, you ensure that when disruption hits, you’re not scrambling but executing.
Building a Practical Disaster Recovery Plan for Cloud Applications
Depending on the criticality of your systems, your DR approach should scale appropriately. Here’s a framework to start with:
According to the AWS Well-Architected Framework, designing for resilience means preparing for failure from day one. Similarly, Microsoft’s Azure Well-Architected Framework emphasizes recovery testing as a key pillar of cloud resilience.
Small Applications (Non-Critical)
Goal: Minimize downtime through fast redeployment.
Recommended Actions:
- Maintain regular, automated backups of data and configurations.
- Use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools (like Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi) so your entire stack can be redeployed consistently.
- Store your deployment scripts and configuration files in version-controlled repositories (e.g., Git).
- During an outage, redeploy from scratch using your latest backup and IaC templates.
This simple setup ensures you can get back online without manual rebuilding.
Medium-Size Applications (Business-Critical but Not Mission-Critical)
Goal: Maintain high availability and reduce recovery friction.
Recommended Actions:
- Increase backup frequency and retention.
- Prepare multi-region deployments within your primary cloud provider.
- Implement replicated environments one active, one on standby in another region.
- Schedule quarterly or semi-annual DR drills where you intentionally deploy from a different region and run production workloads there for a day. DR testing is essential to maintaining cloud resilience over time.
Each test will expose gaps, missing documentation, or unanticipated dependencies. Update your DR playbook after every test to continuously improve resilience.
Mission-Critical Applications
Goal: Achieve near-zero downtime with cross-provider resilience.
Recommended Actions:
- Design for multi-cloud redundancy: for example, host your primary workload in AWS and maintain a warm or hot standby in Azure or Google Cloud. A multi-cloud setup significantly improves cloud resilience.
- Ensure database replication or mirroring between providers to minimize data loss and reduce synchronization time.
- Implement automated failover so that if one environment fails, the other can take over with minimal human intervention.
- Test these failover processes at least annually, ideally during planned downtime or simulations.
If your application generates millions in revenue, your DR investments should reflect its business impact. Cost-cutting in DR planning is often the most expensive mistake a company can make.
Final Thoughts
Cloud outages aren’t rare, but business impact is preventable.
The difference between a six-hour panic and a smooth recovery lies in preparation, documentation, and practice.
Whether your app is small or mission-critical, take time to:
- Document your architecture and dependencies.
- Automate deployments with IaC.
- Test your DR process regularly.
- Refine and simplify after every exercise.
When the next outage happens, and it will, you’ll be ready to act, not react.
If you have a Medium or Small business and are not sure how to start applying Cybersecurity practices, make sure to check the Cyber Resilience Starter Kit. It is completely free, and it is meant to help SMB’s start security conversations.