Glossary
Disaster Recovery (DR)
Disaster recovery (DR) is the set of policies, procedures, and infrastructure needed to restore a system and its data after a catastrophic failure, typically measured by recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).
General definition
Disaster recovery addresses failures that exceed what high availability can absorb: full data-centre outages, accidental mass deletion, ransomware, or multi-region cloud failures. Where HA keeps the service running during routine component failures, DR plans for the cases where something goes fundamentally wrong and the system must be rebuilt or restored from backups.
- RTO (Recovery Time Objective): the maximum acceptable time from failure to restored service
- RPO (Recovery Point Objective): the maximum acceptable data loss, measured as the age of the most recent recoverable backup
- DR runbook: the documented, tested procedure for executing recovery under pressure
- DR drill: a planned test that simulates a failure to verify the runbook and measure actual RTO and RPO
DR complements a backup policy: backups provide the data to restore from, while the DR plan defines who does what, in what order, within the RTO. Regulatory frameworks in healthcare (HIPAA), finance, and insurance typically require documented and regularly tested DR procedures.
In the Ethora ecosystem
On a cloud-hosted Ethora plan, the provider maintains the DR infrastructure and publishes RTO and RPO commitments in the SLA. Customers do not operate backups or failover procedures; they receive restored service within the committed window. The tradeoff is limited visibility into what the DR procedure actually does and where restored data will land geographically.
With a dedicated or self-hosted chat server, you own the DR plan. Ethora can help design a recovery architecture that meets your RTO and RPO requirements, configure automated backups to a geographically separate store, and document a runbook tailored to your environment. For healthcare and financial-services buyers this means you can present the DR procedure to regulators or auditors, specify exactly where recovered data resides for data-residency purposes, and run regular drills under your own schedule. Contact the team to scope DR for your deployment.
