Because in Australia, downtime is a business risk you can’t afford.
The ping of a Slack message.
A service dashboard blinking red.
The phone call: "We’re down."
Whether it's a ransomware attack, a regional outage, or a misconfigured update that wiped production data, disaster doesn’t send a calendar invite. But resilience does. And today, resilience begins in the cloud, but not just any cloud, we're talking about a secure, sovereign, well-structured cloud with a clear and tested disaster recovery (DR) plan.
At Amaze, we’ve worked closely with mid-sized and enterprise businesses across Australia, especially those in highly regulated or data-sensitive sectors. Time and time again, we’ve seen one truth stand out:
You don’t rise to the level of your ambitions. You fall to the level of your preparedness.
So let’s talk about what real preparedness looks like in the cloud, especially for Australian organisations who can’t afford compromises on sovereignty, security, or control.
At its core, a disaster recovery (DR) plan is your business’s insurance policy against downtime. But in the cloud era, it's not just about recovering servers, it's about restoring services, access, and trust - fast.
A well-structured cloud-based DR plan allows you to replicate, restore, and resume critical workloads from geographically redundant environments, without the expense and rigidity of traditional disaster recovery sites.
But here’s the catch: not all clouds, or cloud partners, are created equal.
Let’s break it down into a framework we use when helping our customers at Amaze — one that’s actionable, lean, and tailored for Australian businesses.
Before tools or platforms, start with business needs:
For a law firm, 12 hours might be fine. For a healthcare provider, 30 minutes might be non-negotiable.
Tip: Use tiering. Not all workloads need the same level of recovery speed. Separate mission-critical apps from lower-priority systems.
Modern applications are rarely monoliths. One CRM could depend on six micro-services, three APIs, and an identity provider.
Create a dependency graph for your key workloads. This ensures your DR doesn’t just restore the database, but the entire ecosystem that powers the user experience.
At Amaze, we often use this stage to review legacy apps that may not play well with modern cloud replication and suggest alternatives.
There’s no one-size-fits-all. Here are four proven approaches:
For example: An Australian retail brand could use Warm Standby on Amaze’s sovereign OpenStack cloud to mirror its ERP and eCommerce stack, ensuring sub-hour RTO without doubling costs. Learn more about why we're moving to OpenStack
Cloud DR is not just about recovery, it’s about where and how you recover:
This is where Amaze stands apart: 100% Aussie-owned, carbon neutral, and built for compliance from the first packet to the last.
Manual DR leads to manual mistakes.
Use Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), orchestration tools, and run-book automation to codify your DR process.
In Amaze’s OpenStack environment, customers can leverage tools like Terraform, Ansible, and Heat Orchestration Templates to spin up replicas, failover instances, and reconfigure networks programmatically.
Automation is not just about speed, it’s about repeatability under stress.
A plan untested is a plan untrusted.
Schedule quarterly DR drills. Simulate failures. Rotate responsibilities. Measure your actual RTO vs your target.
Pro Insight: Organisations who test DR twice a year recover 30–40% faster in real-world incidents compared to those who don’t.
At Amaze, we can co-run DR simulations with our customers, that can include ransomware scenario drills to simulated regional cloud outages, so your team never faces a crisis cold.
Here’s something not everyone’s talking about yet: AI infrastructure also needs DR.
As businesses adopt private LLMs, fine-tuned models, or edge AI workloads, DR plans must account for:
We’ve begun planning to integrate AI-ready DR practices into our OpenStack platform, ensuring your data and model performance doesn’t vanish with a power surge.
When our environment is shaped by rising cyber threats, climate risks, and increasing data scrutiny, having an exceptional DR plan is not a box-ticking exercise. It’s a core business function.
At Amaze, we believe your cloud partner should do more than rent you space. We walk beside our customers to plan, test, and continuously refine their recovery playbooks, not just because it’s best practice, but because it’s the backbone of business trust.
We’ll help you map your risk, define your recovery strategy, and build a sovereign, secure, future-proof DR plan in the cloud, powered by our next-gen OpenStack platform.
Reach out and make yourself and your business known to us.
