Business continuity and disaster recovery for Container Registry

Find out about the business continuity and disaster recovery strategy for IBM Cloud® Container Registry.

Disaster recoveryThe ability of IT services to recover from rare but major incidents and non-transient, wide-scale failures, such as service disruption that affects an entire geographical area. The impact of such an incident exceeds the ability of the high availability design to handle it. See also high availability, recovery time objective, recovery point objective. involves a set of policies, tools, and procedures for returning a system, an application, or an entire data center to full operation after a catastrophic interruption. It includes procedures for copying and storing an installed system's essential data in a secure location, and for recovering that data to restore normalcy of operation.

Your responsibilities when you're using Container Registry

For more information about your responsibilities when you're using IBM Cloud Container Registry, see Shared responsibilities for IBM Cloud Container Registry.

Disaster recovery strategy

IBM Cloud has business continuityThe capability of a business to withstand outages and to operate mission-critical services normally and without interruption in accordance with predefined service-level agreements. plans in place to provide for the recovery of services within hours if a disaster occurs. You're responsible for your data backup and associated recovery of your content.

Container Registry provides mechanisms to protect your data and restore service functions. Business continuity plans are in place to achieve targeted recovery point objectiveIn disaster recovery planning, the point at which data is restored to in the event of a disaster. (RPO) and recovery time objectiveThe maximum duration of time within which an application should be restored after any type of disaster. (RTO) for the service. The following table outlines the targets for Container Registry.

RPO and RTO for Container Registry
Disaster recovery objective	Target Value
Recovery point objective (RPO)	48 hours
Recovery time objective (RTO)	24 hours

Locations for service availability

For more information about service availability within regions and data centers, see Service and infrastructure availability by location.

Frequently asked questions about disaster recovery

Review the following FAQs about disaster recovery.

Does the service replicate the data?

All customer data in IBM Cloud Container Registry is replicated and backed up. Backups include service and policy settings and image data, but not vulnerability results, which can be reconstructed. All data, including vulnerability results, is replicated within each region so that the loss of a single availability zone is tolerated transparently. Regular point-in-time backups are used by IBM to restore the content if the data is corrupted. More backups are created in other regions with compatible privacy policies that are used by IBM to restore the service in a disaster situation.

The following table shows the backup locations.

Backup locations
Environment	Active location	Backup location
`ap-north`	`jp-tok`	`au-syd`
`ap-south`	`au-syd`	`jp-tok`
`br-sao`	`br-sao`	`us-south`
`ca-tor`	`ca-tor`	`us-east` (service and policy settings) `ca-mon` (images)
`eu-de`	`eu-de`	`eu-gb`
`eu-es`	`eu-es`	`eu-central`
`eu-gb`	`eu-gb`	`eu-de`
`global`	`us-east`	`us-south`
`jp-osa`	`jp-osa`	`jp-tok`
`us-south`	`us-south`	`us-east`

What data is backed up or replicated?

The image data, service settings, and policy settings are backed up by IBM.

Are users required to replicate the data?

You are not expected to replicate your images. However, you can create a service instance in another IBM Cloud Container Registry region. You can also choose from a range of tools, including pushing to multiple locations from your development pipeline, and the use of replication tools, such as skopeo copy. IBM doesn't replicate service instances.