What are the best practices for setting up disaster recovery strategies using Azure Site Recovery or other tools?

Based on my researches, here are the main best practices :

What are the business requirements and recovery objectives?

Understanding the business requirements and establishing clear recovery objectives is the first step. Ask yourself, what are the critical applications and services that must be recovered? What is the acceptable Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO)? These objectives will guide your disaster recovery planning and help determine the appropriate tools and configurations.

How do you ensure data consistency and integrity?

Maintaining data consistency and integrity during a disaster recovery process is crucial. Azure Site Recovery provides options for application-consistent snapshots, which ensure that the data is captured in a usable state, reducing the risk of corruption. Ask whether your disaster recovery plan includes regular testing of these snapshots to confirm that they meet your RPO and RTO targets.

Have you tested your disaster recovery plan thoroughly?

Regular testing of the disaster recovery plan is essential. Ask yourself, when was the last time you conducted a full failover test? How did the systems perform? Azure Site Recovery allows you to perform non-disruptive test failovers, helping to identify any gaps or issues in your recovery process before an actual disaster occurs.

Are you considering the geographic diversity of your recovery sites?

Geographic diversity is a key consideration in disaster recovery. Where are your primary and secondary data centers located? Are they in different regions to minimize the risk of a regional disaster impacting both? Azure Site Recovery allows you to replicate workloads to a different Azure region or even to an on-premises data center, ensuring that your disaster recovery site is far enough away to avoid a single point of failure.

What is your strategy for network configuration and security during a failover?

During a disaster, the network configuration and security of your failover environment must be carefully managed. Have you planned for how network traffic will be routed in a failover situation? Azure Site Recovery can integrate with Azure Networking features like Virtual Network (VNet) peering and Network Security Groups (NSGs) to ensure that your failover environment is secure and that connectivity is maintained.

How are you managing and automating the failback process?

Failback is just as important as failover. Once the disaster is resolved, how will you return operations to the primary site? Azure Site Recovery provides automated failback capabilities, but it’s important to ask whether your plan includes a clearly defined failback process and whether this process has been tested to ensure smooth operations.

Are you leveraging cloud-native tools alongside traditional DR solutions?

With the growing adoption of cloud services, it's essential to ask whether your disaster recovery strategy takes full advantage of cloud-native tools. Azure offers a range of services, such as Azure Backup and Azure Data Factory, that can complement traditional disaster recovery solutions. Consider how these tools can be integrated into your overall disaster recovery strategy to provide a more comprehensive solution.