Resilience by Design: Disaster Recovery and Failover Strategies for Mission-Critical Applications

Authors: Riyazuddin Mohammed

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37082/IJIRMPS.v13.i5.232782

Short DOI: https://doi.org/

Country: United States

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Abstract: System resilience has become a requirement in the present-day world rather than an afterthought in an environment where organizations rely extensively on digital infrastructures to stay afloat in business. Critical systems - Systems that support vital services, i.e. banking, healthcare, telecommunications and national infrastructure - have to be available 24/7 despite hardware, software malfunction, or cyberattack, or natural calamities. To create resilience in design, an architectural philosophy must be in place where recovering after a disaster (DR) and failover is not seen as ancillary functionality but is incorporated into the design. In this paper, the author will discuss the principles, architecture and practice of the so-called approach to resilience by design, focusing on the proactive actions that can be taken to ensure that systems can absorb, recover, and adapt to disruptions without affecting the continuity of service and data integrity.

One of the major principles of resilient design is the ability to balance Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) with the risk tolerances and impact thresholds of the organization. High-availability (HA) systems are also based on redundancy, replication, and load balancing to avoid downtime due to component failure. Conversely, disaster recovery plans equip the systems against disastrous failures by using solutions like multi-region replication, automated copying and synchronization of the information asynchronously. Technologies like active-active clusters, geographically distributed systems with failover, and cloud systems with DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) are advanced architectures that offer scalable frameworks of ensuring business continuity even in the face of large-scale failure.

In order to make resilience operational, contemporary organizations are using automated failover orchestration, infrastructure as code and chaos engineering a field that purposefully creates faults in order to test system reliability under load. The efficacy of these methods is shown by such industry leaders as Amazon Web Services (AWS) with architectures like Amazon Aurora that employs multi-AZ replication and cross-region backups to ensure that the services are available globally [4]. The study also examines resilience design patterns, which have been put forward by Engelmann and Hukerikar [5], as offering reusable abstractions to typical failure cases- between checkpoint/restart mechanisms and error detection and rollback recovery.

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Paper Id: 232782

Published On: 2025-10-07

Published In: Volume 13, Issue 5, September-October 2025

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