How to read a cloud recovery vendor's claim

What kinds of claims do vendors make?

Four kinds come up across the vendor pages we reviewed:

1. Time claims. Firefly states an RTO under one hour. Arpio states RPOs as low as 15 minutes in its Standard tier and "real-time RPOs" in Premium. ControlMonkey states "85% faster recovery", a customer figure rather than an RTO.
2. Coverage claims. Some vendors publish a resource list, such as Firefly's documented count of AWS and Azure resource types. Others describe coverage in general terms.
3. Protection claims. Words such as immutable, air-gapped or ransomware-safe describe where copies live and who can change them.
4. Recognition claims. Analyst mentions and awards, which describe the vendor rather than your recovery.

Which questions turn a claim into something you can check?

• For a time claim: measured from which moment to which moment? For which application size? Including data restore, or infrastructure only?
• For a coverage claim: is there a published list of resource types per cloud, and what happens to resources not on it?
• For a protection claim: can someone with your production administrator credentials delete or alter the copies?
• For a recognition claim: is the source report public, and what exactly does it say?

How does this site handle claims?

Where a vendor publishes a figure, our pages show it with "vendor claim" and a link to the source. Where a vendor does not publish something, we write "Not published". Nothing on this site is a test result: see the ranking method for the limits of desk research.

What should you take from this lesson?

A claim is a starting point for a trial, not the answer. Our buyer's checklist turns these questions into 24 you can send to vendors, and the briefing on testing cloud disaster recovery shows how to measure the result.