What does "disaster recovery" in cloud environments primarily involve?

Disaster recovery in cloud environments primarily focuses on strategies to recover IT infrastructure after disasters. This encompasses a comprehensive set of practices and tools designed to restore data access and IT functionality following events such as natural disasters, cyberattacks, or hardware failures. The objective is to ensure business continuity by minimizing downtime and data loss.

Effective disaster recovery involves planning and implementing mechanisms like backups, failover solutions, and redundant systems so that organizations can quickly resume their operations. This can be especially critical in cloud contexts, where systems rely on decentralized architectures and often span multiple locations and services.

While avoiding data loss incidents and enhancing network speed after outages are important aspects of maintaining overall system reliability, they do not encapsulate the full scope of disaster recovery. Regularly updating software applications is also a standard best practice in IT, but it is more related to maintaining security and performance rather than directly addressing recovery from catastrophic events.