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Cloud Disaster Recovery Calculator

Test whether a backup, pilot light, warm standby or active-active design actually meets your RTO and RPO, and what it costs.

About Cloud Disaster Recovery Calculator

Each recovery tier is modelled as a fraction of production capacity kept warm, which is what actually drives the standby bill, plus the replication and backup meters that run continuously. The achievable RTO for a backup-and-restore design is dominated by physics rather than price: moving 40 TB at 2 Gbps takes over 40 hours no matter how the runbook is written. Most DR plans fail their own RTO because nobody converted the dataset size and restore bandwidth into hours, and the gap only appears during a real incident. Comparing the annual DR cost with the expected outage loss shows whether the next tier up is worth buying; these are planning estimates, not an insurance calculation.

Formula

Cloud Disaster Recovery

DR cost = production cost × standby fraction × region premium + replicated GB × transfer rate + backup GB × backup rate; restore hours = backup GB × 8 ÷ (Gbps × 3,600).

standby fraction
Share of production capacity kept running — 5% backup, 20% pilot light, 50% warm, 100% active-active
RTO
Recovery time objective — how long recovery may take
RPO
Recovery point objective — how much data you may lose

Worked example

With the default values below, Cloud Disaster Recovery Calculator returns Monthly DR Cost of $32,100.00. Change any input above and every figure here is recalculated in your browser.

Inputs used

Recovery strategyone of Backup and restore, Pilot light, Warm standby, Active-active multi-region
Warm standby
Production environment costaccepts 0–20,000,000 USD/month
60,000 USD/month
Price premium in the recovery regionaccepts 0–50 %
5 %
Data replicated between regionsaccepts 0–5,000,000 GB/month
5,000 GB/month
Inter-region transfer rateaccepts 0–5 USD/GB
0.02 USD/GB
Backup data heldaccepts 0–50,000,000 GB
40,000 GB
Backup storage rateaccepts 0–5 USD/GB-month
0.0125 USD/GB-month
Backup intervalaccepts 0.25–48 hours
4 hours
Restore throughputaccepts 0.01–400 Gbps
2 Gbps
RTO targetaccepts 0.01–720 hours
4 hours
RPO targetaccepts 0.1–10,080 minutes
15 minutes
Cost of an hour of outageaccepts 0–50,000,000 USD/hour
25,000 USD/hour
Expected invocations per yearaccepts 0–100 events/year
1.5 events/year

Results

Monthly DR Cost
$32,100.00
Annual DR Cost
$385,200.00
Achievable RTO
0.50 hours
Achievable RPO
5.0 minutes
Standby Capacity Cost
$31,500.00
Expected Annual Outage Loss
$18,750.00
DR Cost Against Production
53.5%
Does the Design Meet the Targets
The strategy meets both the RTO and the RPO target

Step by step

  1. 1Values used
  2. 2Cloud Disaster Recovery
  3. 3Monthly DR Cost= 32,100.00
  4. 4Annual DR Cost= 385,200.00
  5. 5Achievable RTO= 0.50 hours
  6. 6Achievable RPO= 5.0 minutes
  7. 7Standby Capacity Cost= 31,500.00
  8. 8Expected Annual Outage Loss= 18,750.00

Assumptions and limits

  • The result is derived only from the 13 inputs listed above. Anything not among them is not part of the calculation.
  • In particular, this calculator does not take inflation or tax into account.
  • Figures are rounded for display to 2 decimal places, so totals built from several rounded parts can differ slightly from the unrounded arithmetic.

How these calculators are built and tested is described on the Methodology page. If a figure looks wrong, please report it.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is Cloud Disaster Recovery calculated?

DR cost = production cost × standby fraction × region premium + replicated GB × transfer rate + backup GB × backup rate; restore hours = backup GB × 8 ÷ (Gbps × 3,600). Each recovery tier is modelled as a fraction of production capacity kept warm, which is what actually drives the standby bill, plus the replication and backup meters that run continuously. The achievable RTO for a backup-and-restore design is dominated by physics rather than price: moving 40 TB at 2 Gbps takes over 40 hours no matter how the runbook is written.

Why does Cloud Disaster Recovery matter?

Most DR plans fail their own RTO because nobody converted the dataset size and restore bandwidth into hours, and the gap only appears during a real incident. Comparing the annual DR cost with the expected outage loss shows whether the next tier up is worth buying; these are planning estimates, not an insurance calculation.

What values do I need to enter?

This calculator takes 13 inputs: Recovery strategy, Production environment cost, Price premium in the recovery region, Data replicated between regions, Inter-region transfer rate, Backup data held, Backup storage rate, Backup interval, Restore throughput, RTO target, RPO target, Cost of an hour of outage, Expected invocations per year. The pre-filled defaults are a realistic starting point — replace them with figures from your own environment for a result you can act on.

Why does pilot light have a better RTO than backup and restore if it still restores data?

The pilot light keeps the core infrastructure, databases and network already built and replicating, so recovery is a scale-up rather than a rebuild. Only a fraction of the data ever needs restoring, which is why the restore term is discounted rather than removed.

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