Running critical workloads on Amazon Web Services (AWS) does not make business continuity someone else's problem. Under the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, AWS guarantees the resilience of the cloud — but resilience in the cloud is yours. This guide shows how to design a Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery (BCDR) program for AWS that is both technically sound and audit-ready against ISO 22301, DORA and NIS2 — and how ResiPlan turns that program into living, demonstrable evidence.
What "BCDR for AWS" actually means
BCDR is two disciplines working together:
- Business Continuity (BC) — keeping your business processes running (people, suppliers, communications, decisions) when something breaks.
- Disaster Recovery (DR) — the technical recovery of systems and data.
On AWS, the temptation is to treat DR as a pure infrastructure exercise (snapshots, Multi-AZ, replication). That fails audits. Regulators want to see DR derived from a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) — i.e. recovery objectives that come from business criticality, not from what the platform happens to support.
Step 1 — Set RTO/RPO from business impact, not from AWS features
Two numbers anchor every DR design:
- RTO (Recovery Time Objective) — how long a process can be down before unacceptable harm.
- RPO (Recovery Point Objective) — how much data loss (in time) is tolerable.
Derive them from a BIA per process, then map each tier to an AWS DR strategy:
| RTO / RPO tier | AWS DR strategy | Typical cost |
|---|---|---|
| RTO hours, RPO hours | Backup & Restore (S3, AWS Backup, cross-region copy) | $ |
| RTO ~10s of min, RPO minutes | Pilot Light (core data replicated, infra dormant) | $$ |
| RTO minutes, RPO seconds | Warm Standby (scaled-down live copy) | $$$ |
| RTO near-zero, RPO near-zero | Multi-Region Active/Active | $$$$ |
Use a free RTO/RPO calculator to translate process criticality into target tiers before you architect anything.
Step 2 — Multi-AZ is high availability, not disaster recovery
A frequent audit finding: teams claim "DR" but only have Multi-AZ. Availability Zones protect against a data-centre failure inside one Region. They do not protect against:
- a Region-wide service impairment,
- a corrupted deployment or ransomware that replicates instantly,
- an account-level compromise or accidental deletion.
For genuine DR you need cross-Region capability (Backup & Restore at minimum) and, for critical functions, a tested multi-Region strategy. Document explicitly which threats each layer covers — auditors ask.
Step 3 — A backup strategy that survives an audit (and ransomware)
- AWS Backup with cross-Region and cross-account copy (an attacker in your prod account must not be able to delete your only backups).
- S3 Object Lock / immutability for backup vaults (WORM) — the single most effective control against ransomware-driven backup deletion.
- Encryption with KMS, and a documented key-recovery plan (a lost CMK = unrecoverable data).
- Restore testing on a schedule — an untested backup is a hypothesis. Capture each restore test as evidence.
Step 4 — Don't forget the "business" in BCDR
Even a perfect DR runbook fails if the humans around it aren't prepared. Your AWS BCDR program must also cover:
- Business Continuity Plans (BCP/DRP/IRP) per critical process.
- Crisis communications and an incident command structure.
- Supplier/third-party dependency mapping (AWS is itself a critical third party — DORA treats it as an ICT provider).
- Exercises — tabletop and technical failover drills, at least annually.
Step 5 — Map AWS BCDR to your compliance obligations
This is where most cloud DR programs lose marks. The same controls must answer to multiple frameworks:
- ISO 22301 — clause 8.4 (business continuity strategies), 8.5 (exercising), 8.4.4 (recovery). Your AWS DR tiers are your continuity strategies.
- DORA (Reg. EU 2022/2554) — AWS is an ICT third-party provider; you need it in your Register of Information, a defined exit strategy, and resilience testing (Art. 24-27). Critical functions need documented RTO/RPO justifications (Art. 11-12).
- NIS2 (Dir. EU 2022/2555) — business continuity, backup management and crisis management are explicit requirements (Art. 21).
How ResiPlan operationalises BCDR for AWS
ResiPlan is a Business Continuity Management System (BCMS) built for exactly this mapping:
- BIA-driven RTO/RPO that feed your AWS DR tiering, with full traceability.
- AI plan generators (BCP/DRP/IRP) that draft AWS-specific recovery runbooks you refine.
- CMDB + dependency mapping to record AWS as a critical ICT provider for DORA.
- Exercise & maturity modules to plan, run and evidence failover drills (ISO 22301 clause 8.5).
- Audit-ready compliance dashboards for DORA, NIS2 and ISO 22301 from a single source of truth.
Start here: run the DORA readiness checklist and the ISO 22301 checklist, then book a demo to see your AWS workloads mapped to a defensible continuity program.
BCDR for AWS is not a backup job — it's a business decision, evidenced. ResiPlan keeps that evidence current, so your next audit takes hours, not weeks.