A company’s disaster recovery requirements specify an RTO (Recovery Time Objective) of under 5 minutes and an RPO (Recovery Point Objective) of near-zero data loss. Which DR strategy best meets these requirements?
A) Backup and Restore — back up data to S3 and restore infrastructure from scratch when disaster strikes.
B) Pilot Light — keep core infrastructure minimally running, scale up on disaster.
C) Warm Standby — run a scaled-down but fully functional copy of the environment continuously.
D) Multi-Site Active-Active — run full production capacity in two or more regions simultaneously, serving live traffic.
Correct Answer: D
Explanation: Multi-Site Active-Active is the only strategy that can achieve an RTO of minutes and near-zero RPO, because production traffic is already being served from multiple regions simultaneously with continuously synchronized data — there’s no “recovery” step, just a traffic shift (e.g., via Route 53 failover routing).
Why the others are wrong: (A) Backup and Restore typically has RTO/RPO measured in hours. (B) Pilot Light requires scaling up infrastructure before it can serve traffic. (C) Warm Standby improves on Pilot Light but still requires a scale-up step and DNS failover, generally landing in the tens-of-minutes RTO range.