How to Build an Enterprise Disaster Recovery Plan Without Breaking Performance

Want to keep mission-critical workloads online through disruption? See how Equinix can help you build a disaster recovery strategy around workload placement, resilient infrastructure, and the connectivity your recovery architecture requires: https://eqix.it/4gOYqi5 How do you build an enterprise disaster recovery plan without sacrificing performance or blowing your budget? This video explains how to design disaster recovery architecture around the risks your organization actually needs to manage—not simply how far apart your primary and DR sites are. Sarit Quirin, Principal Solutions Architect at Equinix, walks through two common enterprise disaster recovery patterns: metro-close DR, which can maximize performance and support active-active architectures, and distance-max DR, which provides greater protection against regional risks but introduces challenges around replication latency and failover design. From there, the strategy starts with RTO (recovery time objective) and RPO (recovery point objective) for each workload. These requirements can then determine the appropriate level of DR investment, from backup and recovery to pilot light, warm standby, and active-active architectures. Immutable or air-gapped backup can provide an additional recovery point for ransomware and logical data corruption. The video also explains why correlated risk separation matters when placing DR sites. Separating power infrastructure, environmental risks, carrier paths, and platform dependencies can help prevent production and DR environments from sharing the same failure domain. Controlled connectivity is another critical part of an enterprise disaster recovery plan. A neutral hub can act as a controlled point between production and DR, with firewall policies and one-way replication helping limit the propagation of an incident. The architecture can use technologies such as Equinix Network Edge and Equinix Fabric for virtual firewalling and private connectivity between sites. Finally, effective disaster recovery requires continuous failover and failback testing—not an annual exercise. Supporting systems such as identity, DNS, monitoring, and ticketing also need to be included in the recovery plan because a workload can be fully protected while the systems needed to recover it remain exposed. FAQs: Q: What is an enterprise disaster recovery plan? A: An enterprise disaster recovery plan defines how critical workloads and supporting systems will recover after an outage or other disruptive event. The approach should account for workload-level RTO and RPO requirements, failure domains, recovery architecture, connectivity, and ongoing testing. Q: How do you build a cost-efficient disaster recovery strategy? A: Tier workloads according to their RTO and RPO requirements instead of applying the same DR architecture everywhere. Options can range from backup and recovery to pilot light, warm standby, and active-active, with DR resources also used for development, testing, or non-production workloads where appropriate. Q: What is a shared failure domain in disaster recovery? A: A shared failure domain exists when production and DR depend on the same underlying risk—for example, the same power grid, environmental exposure, carrier path, or cloud platform. Effective DR focuses on separating correlated risks, not simply maximizing geographic distance. Q: Why is continuous DR testing important? A: Failover and failback testing helps validate that the disaster recovery plan works in practice and exposes gaps before an incident. Supporting systems such as identity, DNS, monitoring, and ticketing should be tested as part of the recovery process. Chapters: 0:00 — Why enterprise DR needs to balance risk, performance, and cost 0:33 — Two enterprise DR patterns: metro-close vs. distance-max 3:16 — Set RTO and RPO for each workload 4:10 — Build a tiered DR strategy 5:48 — Nonprofit example: 5x compute for ~$30K annually 6:35 — Separate correlated risks, not just distance 8:11 — Controlled connectivity between production and DR 9:44 — Continuous failover and failback testing 10:10 — The supporting systems DR plans often miss 11:01 — Putting RTO, RPO, failure domains, and connectivity together Continue exploring Private Infrastructure for strategies around workload placement, resilient infrastructure, and enterprise architecture: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL55oxNORDfUEmsDVqKi315JxZO2OV9Vny About Equinix: Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX) shortens the path to boundless connectivity anywhere in the world. Its digital infrastructure, data center footprint and interconnected ecosystems empower innovations that enhance our work, life and planet. Equinix connects economies, countries, organizations and communities, delivering seamless digital experiences and cutting-edge AI—quickly, efficiently and everywhere. 6336