Disaster Recovery: RPO/RTO, Backup Testing, and Failover Strategies

Part of the Cybersecurity Skills Guide — This article is one deep-dive in our complete guide series.

By HADESS Team | February 28, 2026 | Updated: February 28, 2026 | 5 min read

Disaster recovery is the plan you hope you never need but absolutely must have. When ransomware encrypts your production database at 2 AM, or your primary data center loses power, the quality of your DR program determines whether you recover in hours or weeks. Most organizations discover their DR plan is inadequate during an actual incident — do not be one of them.

RPO and RTO Planning

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) defines how much data loss you can tolerate. An RPO of 1 hour means you need backups or replication at least every hour. An RPO of zero means synchronous replication — no data loss is acceptable.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) defines how quickly you need to restore operations. An RTO of 4 hours means your systems must be functional within 4 hours of a declared disaster.

RPO and RTO are business decisions, not technical ones. The cost of reducing RPO from 24 hours to 1 hour is significant — more frequent backups, replication infrastructure, and testing overhead. Work with business stakeholders to define acceptable values for each system based on its impact on operations and revenue.

Document RPO/RTO targets for every business-critical system. A CRM going down for a day is different from your payment processing system going down for a day. Tier your systems and allocate resources accordingly.

Backup Testing

Backups that have not been tested are assumptions, not backups. Schedule regular restore tests:

Full restore tests quarterly — spin up a complete environment from backups and verify functionality. This catches silent backup failures, corrupted data, missing configuration, and undocumented dependencies.

Partial restore tests monthly — restore individual databases, files, or services. Verify data integrity after restore. Compare row counts, checksums, and sample data against production.

Backup monitoring continuously — alert on backup job failures, missed schedules, and unexpected size changes. A backup that suddenly shrinks might indicate data loss or a misconfigured job.

Follow the 3-2-1 rule: three copies of your data, on two different media types, with one copy offsite. For ransomware resilience, add immutable storage — backups that cannot be modified or deleted for a defined retention period, even by administrators.

Failover Strategies

Active-passive failover maintains a standby environment that activates when the primary fails. The standby can be warm (running but not serving traffic) or cold (infrastructure provisioned but not running). Warm standbys recover faster but cost more.

Active-active failover distributes traffic across multiple sites simultaneously. If one site fails, the remaining sites absorb the traffic. This provides the lowest RTO but requires applications designed for multi-site operation — data consistency, session management, and conflict resolution across sites.

Cloud-based DR uses cloud infrastructure as the recovery target. Replicate data to cloud storage, maintain infrastructure-as-code templates, and spin up compute resources during a disaster. This reduces the cost of maintaining idle standby infrastructure.

For databases, choose between synchronous and asynchronous replication based on your RPO. Synchronous replication provides zero data loss but adds latency. Asynchronous replication reduces latency but allows some data loss during failover.

DR Exercises

Conduct tabletop exercises twice a year. Walk through a disaster scenario with all stakeholders — IT, security, management, communications. Identify gaps in procedures, unclear responsibilities, and missing runbooks.

Conduct technical failover tests annually. Actually fail over to your DR environment. Real failovers expose problems that tabletop exercises miss: DNS propagation delays, TLS certificate issues, connection string configurations, and license activation failures.

After each exercise, document lessons learned and update your DR plan. A DR plan that was last updated two years ago does not reflect your current infrastructure.

Related Career Paths

Disaster recovery planning maps to Security Engineer and Security Manager career paths. Engineers build the technical infrastructure, and managers own the program governance and testing cadence.

Next Steps

• Evaluate your disaster recovery knowledge with the skills assessment
• Browse the skills library for business continuity and resilience topics
• Use the coaching tool to develop your DR and business continuity expertise

Related Guides in This Series

• Agile Security: Embedding Security in Sprints and Development Cycles — HADESS | 2026
• AI/ML Security: Adversarial Attacks, Model Poisoning, and Prompt Injection — HADESS | 2026
• Compliance Management: SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, and HIPAA — HADESS | 2026

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