Cost-Benefit Analysis of AWS Disaster Recovery Options for Enterprise Environments

To facilitate decision-making needs for enterprises of various sizes, this paper provides an assessment of the costs and benefits of the different AWS DR solutions for enterprise environments. This paper assesses three major AWS disaster recovery solutions: Backup and restore for small businesses, Pilot or Warm Standby for mid-sized businesses, and Multi-Site Active/Active for large businesses. Hence, the research establishes the trade-off of each approach in terms of RTOs, cost, RPO, and service availability to give a clear understanding of which DR solution fits particular business needs. Hence, small enterprises rely on low-cost solutions such as Backup and Restore techniques, despite their slow recovery ability, to help avoid data loss or disruption of services. Slightly larger businesses, which see the necessity of balancing cost and speed, will consider the Pilot Light or Warm Standby strategies as more appropriate because they provide faster recovery and less dissatisfaction among the clients. However, the Multi-Site Active/Active solution that is mostly suitable for large enterprises with high-availability requirements footprint has virtually no RTO and, therefore, excellent business continuity despite the higher costs. It also discusses scaling, cost vs recovery speed, and trends of the future for the cloud disaster recovery such as serverless, AI, Edge computing, and Blockchain. The insights gleaned herein offer direction to those making choices in enterprise environments to ensure they consider the business criticality, regulatory analyses, growth opportunities and financial implications of AWS disaster recovery strategies.