Plan your Azure-based disaster recovery strategy with RTO and RPO targets, failover procedures, and testing schedules.
A robust disaster recovery plan is essential for business resilience, and Azure provides powerful tools to implement cost-effective DR strategies. This template guides UK businesses through planning their Azure-based disaster recovery, including setting realistic RTO and RPO targets, designing failover procedures, and establishing regular testing schedules. It ensures your critical systems can be recovered quickly in the event of a major incident.
IT managers, infrastructure engineers, and business continuity leads at UK businesses implementing disaster recovery solutions using Microsoft Azure.
RTO, or recovery time objective, is how quickly a system must be restored after an outage, while RPO, or recovery point objective, is how much data loss, measured in time, is acceptable. A critical finance system might need an RTO under an hour and an RPO of minutes, while less critical systems can typically tolerate several hours of either.
Azure Site Recovery pricing is typically based on protected instance count, often working out to a few pounds per protected server per month, plus storage and egress costs during failover testing or an actual event. Most UK SMEs find it considerably cheaper than maintaining a fully duplicated physical DR site.
Most UK businesses run a tabletop exercise quarterly and a full failover test at least annually, with more frequent testing for systems classed as business-critical. Testing reveals gaps that documentation alone won't, such as outdated contact lists or configuration drift between primary and recovery environments since the last drill.
A solid plan sets RTO and RPO targets by system criticality, documents failover and failback procedures, defines a testing schedule, and includes a communication plan for notifying staff and customers during an incident. This template provides a structured format covering each of these elements for an Azure-based recovery strategy.
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