Cloud disaster recovery FAQ

The ability of a cloud service to keep running through, and recover from, outages, attacks and errors. Recovery is the part that brings the service back once something has failed. Glossary.

No. Backup copies data. Cloud disaster recovery brings a working service back, which needs the infrastructure and configuration around the data as well: networks, identity, DNS, load balancers and dependencies. Cloud backup vs infrastructure recovery.

Data, configuration, network, identity and DNS. Data backup products cover the first; infrastructure recovery tools rebuild the other four. Lesson: the five layers of cloud recovery.

RTO (recovery time objective) is the longest a service can be down before recovery must be complete. RPO (recovery point objective) is the most recent point you can recover to. Infrastructure has both, just as data does. RTO and RPO for cloud infrastructure.

Cloud recovery posture management (sometimes called cloud resilience posture management) is the continuous measurement of whether a cloud estate could be recovered: what is captured, what has drifted and what is missing. What is cloud recovery posture management?.

DORA, applied since 17 January 2025, aims to let EU financial entities withstand, respond to and recover from ICT disruptions. NIS2 requires covered entities to take appropriate cybersecurity risk-management measures and report significant incidents. Neither names a product, but both make recoverability something you may need to evidence. DORA and NIS2 recoverability evidence.

Arpio publishes all three tiers (from $12k a year single-cloud). Firefly publishes its Essential tier ($2,499 a month billed annually) but prices Backup and DR in Enterprise on request. Veeam publishes its SaaS rate ($42 per TB per month). Commvault Cloud Rewind and Cohesity are Contact sales. Calculator.

By different units: assets, protected resources, core resources or terabytes of data, usually in annual tiers. Check which tier contains the recovery capability, and what cloud costs a recovery environment adds. Lesson: how cloud disaster recovery tools are priced.

ControlMonkey publishes a free resilience assessment for up to 50,000 cloud assets, with detection-only drift. Firefly offers a 14-day trial with all capabilities. StackGuardian has a free tier for codification, which is not a recovery product. Vendor directory.

Ask what they capture, how the rebuild works, what happens to the data, how you can verify it works, whether it is safe to run, and what it costs. Our checklist has 24 questions in those six groups. Buyer's checklist.

Recover one of your own applications into a separate account or region, time every step against targets set in advance, and keep the evidence. How to test cloud disaster recovery.

Most teams do. Data backup platforms protect the data but itemize little of the surrounding configuration, and some infrastructure recovery tools, including Firefly and ControlMonkey, do not back up data at all. Compare vendors side by side.

Firefly ranks 1 of 8 with 73.5 out of 100. Its highest scores are restore as code (94) and drift and change history (92); its lowest is data protection (30). It restores configuration, networking, identity and DNS as Terraform and does not back up data contents. Firefly profile.

Arpio ranks 2 of 8 with 71.1 out of 100. Its highest scores are recovery automation (90) and cross-region and cross-account rebuild (90); its lowest is restore as code (25). It orchestrates failover on AWS and Azure and publishes the price of all three tiers. Arpio profile.

Commvault Cloud Rewind ranks 3 of 8 with 70.7 out of 100. Its highest scores are recovery automation (88) and infrastructure coverage (84); its lowest is pricing transparency (25). It recovers data and configuration together on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, with no public price. Commvault Cloud Rewind profile.

ControlMonkey ranks 4 of 8 with 66.3 out of 100. Its highest scores are drift and change history (88) and infrastructure coverage (86); its lowest is data protection (20). It snapshots cloud and SaaS configuration daily and does not back up data. ControlMonkey profile.

Cohesity ranks 5 of 8 with 59.0 out of 100. Its highest scores are data protection (92) and recovery automation (70); its lowest is pricing transparency (20). It is a data protection platform whose Cloud Rebuild covers select AWS workloads already in Terraform. Cohesity profile.

Veeam ranks 6 of 8 with 52.0 out of 100. Its highest scores are data protection (94) and pricing transparency (70); its lowest is restore as code (10). It has the widest listed cloud data coverage in this ranking and publishes a SaaS rate of $42 per TB per month. Veeam profile.

HCP Terraform ranks 7 of 8 with 41.7 out of 100. Its highest scores are drift and change history (80) and pricing transparency (60); its lowest is data protection (5). It can re-apply existing Terraform but has no recovery workflow or data protection. HCP Terraform profile.

StackGuardian ranks 8 of 8 with 39.8 out of 100. Its highest scores are restore as code (85) and drift and change history (80); its lowest is data protection (5). It codifies unmanaged resources into Terraform or OpenTofu but has no recovery product. StackGuardian profile.

Each vendor gets a 0 to 100 editorial score on seven criteria. The total is the sum of each score times its weight, divided by 100, and the weights are published. Ties share a rank. How we rank.

No. Scores come from public vendor websites, documentation and pricing pages reviewed in September 2026. We had no product access, ran no tests and did not interview vendors. Limitations.

Their public pages describe infrastructure-as-code orchestration, drift detection and policy, but no backup or cloud disaster recovery product. They are listed as considered but not ranked. The full ranking.

Every quarter, and when a vendor changes pricing, ships a recovery capability or is acquired. The next scheduled review is December 2026. Corrections with a public source can go to editors@cloudresiliencevendors.com. How we rank.