Disaster recovery framework for ensuring SME business continuity on cloud platforms

Disaster recovery (DR) is a critical component of ensuring business continuity, especially for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) that rely heavily on cloud platforms for their operations. SMEs face unique challenges, including limited financial and technical resources, making it essential to develop a disaster recovery framework that is both cost-effective and robust. This proposes a disaster recovery framework that minimizes downtime and data loss, leveraging the capabilities of cloud platforms to ensure continuous business operations. The proposed framework focuses on three key objectives viz reducing Recovery Point Objectives (RPO), minimizing Recovery Time Objectives (RTO), and ensuring scalability. RPO refers to the amount of data that can be lost before causing significant harm to the business, while RTO measures the time it takes to restore operations after a disaster. The framework achieves these objectives through cloud-based replication and automated backup systems. Data replication across geographically distributed data centers ensures that a copy of the data is always available, while incremental backups reduce the potential for data loss, ensuring that SMEs can recover recent transactions and information with minimal disruption. Automation plays a central role in the disaster recovery process. Using tools like AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery or Azure Site Recovery, SMEs can implement automated failover procedures that trigger in the event of an outage. This automation significantly reduces manual intervention, decreasing the likelihood of human error while improving recovery speed. Furthermore, periodic testing of disaster recovery plans is incorporated to ensure preparedness, with simulations identifying any vulnerabilities in the DR strategy. By using a pay-as-you-go model for cloud resources, SMEs can scale their disaster recovery solutions as their operations grow, optimizing costs while maintaining flexibility. This framework provides a comprehensive, affordable solution for SMEs to safeguard their business continuity, protecting them from the potentially devastating impacts of data loss and downtime. Keywords: Disaster Recovery, SME Business, Cloud Platforms, Review.