Backups and failovers proven to work every month, not assumed.
Most recovery plans are tested once a year, if at all. Agents restore your backups into an isolated account, run failover drills on a schedule and measure the result against your recovery objectives. You find out what would really happen in an outage, and get the fix for every gap before you need it.
Monthly restore test: orders-db and payments-api
Measured RTO 71 min against a 60 min target
[The work behind every recovery plan]
01The manual work
Hope
The DR plan lives in a document. Restores are tested once a year, take a weekend, and the findings are out of date by spring.
02The agent handoff
Recovery proven
Frontier agents restore and fail over in isolation on a schedule, time every step and prepare a fix for each gap they find.
03Your engineers’ role
Approve
Set the recovery objectives and the test calendar. Approve the fixes and sign off the results.
[Where CloudThinker fits]
01Backups and replicas
What you already protect
No change to backup policy
02Recovery plan
Your system of record
The plan stays yours
03Recovery drills
CloudThinker
Drills run in isolated accounts
04Evidence
Proven, then filed
Failover runs on approval
[Example scenario]
A payments company with a 1-hour RTO and 15-minute RPO for its order path, primary in us-east-1 with a warm standby in us-west-2. The regulator asks for annual DR evidence.
Test starts in isolationAgent
Copies last night’s AWS Backup recovery points for orders-db into an isolated recovery account. Production is not touched.
Restore verifiedAgent
orders-db restored and checked: row counts match, latest transaction 9 minutes before the backup. Inside the 15-minute RPO.
Failover drillAgent
Starts payments-api in the us-west-2 standby and runs synthetic orders against it.
App fails to startSignal
payments-api cannot read its database secret. The secret exists only in us-east-1.
Gap measured, fix proposedAgent
Measured RTO 71 minutes against 60. Proposes Secrets Manager replication to us-west-2 as a Terraform change, PR #902.
SRE lead approvesYour team
Merges the change, schedules a re-test for Friday, and downloads the evidence pack for the audit file.
CloudThinker10:22
Restore check passed. orders-db restored in 22 min in the recovery account. Data loss window 9 min, inside the 15 min RPO.
CloudThinker11:11
Failover gap: payments-api could not read prod/payments/db in us-west-2. Secret is not replicated. Measured RTO 71 min, target 60. Fix: replicate the secret, PR #902.
SRE lead14:00
Merged. Re-run the failover on Friday please.
CloudThinker14:01
Re-test scheduled for Friday 10:00. Evidence pack for this run saved to the DR audit folder.
An illustrative example. Team, systems and times are representative, not a specific customer.
[Frontier resolution agents]
Agents test recovery on a calendar, so your RTO and RPO become measured numbers, not targets, and every gap arrives with a fix ready to review.
[What changes]
| Moment | Today | With frontier agents |
|---|---|---|
| Restore testing | Once a year, if at all | Every month, on a schedule |
| Recovery time | A target in a document | A number measured in each test |
| Gaps in the plan | Found during a real outage | Found in a drill, fix ready |
| Test effort | A weekend for the whole team | Runs in isolation, reviewed in an hour |
| Audit evidence | Written up after the fact | Produced by every run |
[Integrations]
[Adoption path]
The rollout follows the four phases of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework, so it fits the plan your cloud team already runs.
01Envision
Test one critical system
Pick the system with the strictest objectives. Agents restore its backups in an isolated account and report what they find.
02Align
Write the objectives down
Agree RTO and RPO per system, the test calendar, and the stop conditions for every drill.
03Launch
Cover the critical path
Add the services, data stores and dependencies the business needs first after an outage.
04Scale
Make it the default
New systems get recovery tests from launch. Evidence lands in the audit folder every month.
[AWS guidance]
[Trust and control]
[Questions]
[Go deeper]
Start with one critical system. See your real recovery time before you change anything in production.

Up to $200K in AWS credits
Applied to your own AWS account.

AWS AI Services Competency
Validated for Agentic AI Consulting.

Covered 24/7, on your approval
Under HIPAA, GDPR and SOC 2 controls.