What is the recommended disaster recovery plan for protecting critical data between two sites?

Creating a disaster recovery (DR) environment in a geographically separate region, such as the US West, is a widely accepted practice for protecting critical data. This approach ensures that your data is stored in a different location, which can safeguard it against regional outages or disasters. By establishing a DR environment in another region, you can implement backup strategies, failover mechanisms, and ensure the availability of services even if the primary site becomes compromised.

Using a separate region helps to mitigate risks related to data loss caused by natural disasters, power outages, or network failures that could affect a single site. This redundancy is a core principle of a robust disaster recovery strategy, as it allows for the quick restoration of services with minimal disruption.

In contrast, options such as establishing a Direct Connect connection or a local peering connection may enhance network performance or facilitate data transfer, but they do not specifically address the need for a dedicated DR environment that can stand alone during critical outages. Additionally, associating a DRG with both regions and configuring a VPN could improve connectivity but still relies on the assumption that both sites are operational, thus not fully aligning with disaster recovery best practices focused on redundancy and data protection.