Disaster recovery is the set of policies, tools, and procedures that enable the recovery of IT infrastructure and data after a natural disaster, cyberattack, hardware failure, or other disruption. Key metrics include Recovery Time Objective (RTO) — how quickly systems must be restored — and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) — how much data loss is acceptable. Cloud-based disaster recovery using Azure Site Recovery or AWS Backup can achieve RTO as low as 15 minutes, compared to days for traditional tape-based backup approaches.