Disaster recovery (DR) is the plan for getting a workload running again after a major event, such as a Region-wide outage, widespread data corruption or a ransomware attack. It differs from high availability, which handles smaller failures like a lost instance or AZ within a Region. Two numbers drive every DR decision. The recovery point objective (RPO) is how much data, measured in time, the business can afford to lose: an RPO of one hour means you can lose at most the last hour of changes. The recovery time objective (RTO) is how long the workload can be down before service is restored. Lower RPO and RTO cost more, so you match the strategy to the business need rather than always choosing the most resilient option.
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