Understanding business continuity and disaster recovery for Cloud Databases

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.

Responsibilities

To find out more about responsibility ownership for using IBM Cloud® products between IBM and customer see Shared responsibilities for IBM Cloud products.

For more information about your responsibilities when using Cloud Databases, see Shared responsibilities for Cloud Databases.

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 are responsible for your data backup and associated recovery of your content.

Cloud Databases 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 Cloud Databases.

Table 1. RPO and RTO for Cloud Databases
Disaster recovery objective	Target Value
RPO	< 24 hours
RTO	<24 hours - for Regional failure (0 hours for Zone Failure)

Locations

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

Backup Storage Regions

The purpose of the Cloud Databases regional Disaster Recovery (DR) policy is to make IBM Cloud® Object Storage backups available from the downed region available for you to restore.

Table 2. Single Region Backups for Cloud Databases
Region	Backup Storage Region	Cross-Region Support?
`us-south`	US Cross Regional Endpoint	Yes
`jp-osa`	Asia Pacific Cross Regional Endpoint	Yes
`jp-tok`	Asia Pacific Cross Regional Endpoint	Yes
`eu-gb`	Europe Cross Regional Endpoint	Yes
`us-east`	US Cross Regional Endpoint	Yes
`au-syd`	Asia Pacific Cross Regional Endpoint	Yes
`che01`	Che01 Single Data Center Endpoint	No*
`ca-tor`	Mon01 Single Data Center Endpoint	No*
`br-sao`	Br-sao Regional Endpoint	No*
`eu-de`	Europe Cross Regional Endpoint	Yes
`par01`	Europe Cross Regional Endpoint	Yes
`eu-es`	Europe Cross Regional Endpoint	Yes

Keep a local copy of your data.