Public cloud, private cloud, hybrid — for many boards these words simply mean "expensive and complicated". In reality a well-designed cloud reduces TCO and strengthens business resilience. Here we break Disaster Recovery in the cloud — how to plan down into simple decision steps.
Cloud DR plan — from requirements to tests.
Business requirements
This section frames the topic "Business requirements" in the context of Disaster Recovery in the cloud — how to plan. We approach it from the business side — what concrete value or risk it brings to the company.
What you gain
- Scalability — you pay for what you actually use.
- High availability without investing in your own HA infrastructure.
- Faster rollout of new applications and test environments.
Most common mistakes
- Lift-and-shift migration without optimisation — the cloud ends up more expensive than the on-prem room.
- No resource tagging — after six months nobody knows what belongs to whom.
- Publicly open storage buckets — the most common source of leaks.
DR architecture
Backup is not "copy a folder to an external drive". It is a defined process that specifies what, how often, where and for how long is copied — and how quickly it can be restored.
How many copies and where to keep them
- At least three copies of the data on two different media,
- one copy off-site (another office, cloud, colocation),
- one copy offline or immutable (ransomware-proof and safe from accidental overwrites),
- zero errors during the restore test.
That last point matters most — a backup that was never tested statistically fails to restore in 30–40% of cases at the critical moment. Quarterly restore tests are the standard we recommend to every client.
Tests
This section frames the topic "Tests" in the context of Disaster Recovery in the cloud — how to plan. We approach it from the business side — what concrete value or risk it brings to the company.
What you gain
- Scalability — you pay for what you actually use.
- High availability without investing in your own HA infrastructure.
- Faster rollout of new applications and test environments.
Most common mistakes
- Lift-and-shift migration without optimisation — the cloud ends up more expensive than the on-prem room.
- No resource tagging — after six months nobody knows what belongs to whom.
- Publicly open storage buckets — the most common source of leaks.
Costs
A conversation about cloud costs starts with a single question: what exactly are we buying?. In practice there are three types of billing: flat fee, hourly, and mixed (base + overage). Each makes sense in a different scenario.
- Flat fee — a predictable cost, best for companies with a stable number of users and systems.
- Hourly — flexible, but hard to budget for a whole year.
- Mixed — the base covers 80% of the work, overage is billed separately; the most common model in SMEs.
What to watch for in a quote
The rate alone is not everything. Check what exactly the price covers, what the hour cap is, how out-of-scope projects are priced and whether travel is billed. The gap between the cheapest and most expensive offer in Poland can be 3–4× — and it usually comes down to what is "in the price" and what is not.
Key takeaways
- Scalability — you pay for what you actually use.
- Lift-and-shift migration without optimisation — the cloud ends up more expensive than the on-prem room.
- Treat the topic of "Disaster Recovery in the cloud — how to plan" as a project, not a one-off purchase — the best results come from a step-by-step approach.
Frequently asked questions
Planning a cloud migration?
Book a free cloud consultation. We will do a quick assessment of your current infrastructure, estimate cloud TCO and present a migration plan tuned to your budget.