Learn to design and implement disaster recovery and business continuity strategies that keep systems running and data protected through outages, disasters, and cyberattacks. You will set RTO and RPO targets from business impact analysis, design backup schemes including immutable copies, and architect active-passive and active-active failover. The course covers cloud DR with AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery and Azure Site Recovery, tabletop exercises and testing programs, and alignment with ISO 22301 and NIST SP 800-34.

Modules

Recovery Objectives and Planning Foundations

Lessons

• RTO and RPO: Translating Downtime Tolerance into Design Targets Preview
• Business Impact Analysis: Ranking Systems by Consequence
• SLAs and Recovery Tiers: Matching Spend to Criticality

Backup Strategy and Data Protection

Lessons

• Full Incremental and Differential Backups: Choosing a Rotation Scheme
• The 3-2-1 Rule and Offsite Copy Design
• Immutable Backups: Defeating Ransomware with WORM Storage

Failover Architecture Design

Lessons

• Active-Passive Failover: Warm Standbys and DNS Cutover
• Active-Active Architectures: Load Distribution Across Sites
• Replication Choices: Synchronous vs Asynchronous Trade-offs

Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery

Lessons

• Pilot Light Warm Standby and Multi-Site Cloud DR Models
• AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery: Continuous Replication into EC2
• Azure Site Recovery: Protecting VMs with Recovery Plans

Testing and Exercising the Plan

Lessons

• Designing Tabletop Exercises That Expose Real Gaps
• From Walkthroughs to Full Failover: A DR Testing Ladder
• After-Action Reviews: Turning Test Findings into Plan Updates

Standards Governance and Compliance

Lessons

• ISO 22301: Building a Business Continuity Management System
• NIST SP 800-34: Structuring the IT Contingency Plan
• Audits Evidence and Continuous Improvement of the DR Program