Expert Circle Webinar - Mastering Enhanced Disaster Recovery: What We Learned in 45 Minutes
What happens when an entire cloud region goes down? For organisations running mission‑critical Pega applications, this isn’t hypothetical—it’s a real operational risk.
This question was explored in our Pega as‑a‑Service Expert Circle webinar, “Mastering Enhanced Disaster Recovery”, hosted by Abhay Prabhu with insights from our experts Shashank Mishra and Meenakshi Nayak. The session focused on how Pega’s Enhanced Disaster Recovery capability keeps applications running even during large‑scale regional outages.
Why Enhanced Disaster Recovery Matters
Pega Cloud environments already include High Availability to protect against component‑level or availability‑zone failures within a region. However, HA cannot address complete regional outages.
Enhanced Disaster Recovery is a managed, subscription‑based capability for Pega Cloud 3 that protects applications from catastrophic regional failures. It achieves this by automatically failing over to a geographically isolated paired region at least 200 km away.
Enhanced Disaster Recovery follows a “failover and stay” approach—once a disaster is detected, the application moves to the recovery region and continues operating there until the primary region is fully restored. The entire process is automated and requires no client intervention.
Key Highlights from the webinar
Guaranteed Recovery Objectives
Enhanced Disaster Recovery comes with clearly defined recovery targets:
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO) : 2.5 hours
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO): less than 15 minutes
These guarantees are supported by automated detection, orchestration, and restoration processes managed entirely by Pega.
Simplicity by Design
Enhanced Disaster Recovery is designed so that critical configuration is completed during onboarding, not during a crisis. During onboarding, Pega provisions infrastructure in your paired backup region and shares the corresponding IP addresses. Clients are responsible for whitelisting these IPs in their firewalls and allow lists at the time of onboarding — meaning that if a regional outage ever occurs, no additional network configuration is needed during the recovery. Pega handles continuous data replication, configuration sync, and periodic simulation testing.
Enhanced Disaster Recovery vs. High Availability: Understanding the Difference
|
High Availability |
Enhanced Disaster Recovery |
|
|
Protects against |
Component/AZ failures within a region |
Catastrophic regional outages |
|
Redundancy |
Availability Zones within one region |
Paired regions 200km+ apart |
|
Cost |
Included out-of-the-box |
Paid subscription |
Requirements and Availability
- Requires Pega Platform 24.2 or higher
- Only available on Pega Cloud 3 (Cloud 2 clients must migrate)
- Currently live for AWS; GCP support expected by end of Q2
- EDR does not come automatically with Cloud 3 — it must be subscribed to separately
Confidence Through Testing
To ensure reliability, Pega performs quarterly internal Disaster Recovery simulations and provides customers with one annual sandbox simulation to validate recovery timelines and outcomes.
Who Should Care
- CIOs and IT Leaders responsible for business continuity
- Architects designing highly resilient enterprise platforms
- Regulated industries with strict uptime and data‑loss requirements
- Organisations running customer‑facing or revenue‑critical Pega applications
Final Thoughts
Enhanced Disaster Recovery shifts disaster recovery from a manual contingency into a predictable, managed service—providing confidence that systems will remain available even during the most severe outages.
Join the Conversation
We'd love to hear your thoughts and questions! Head over to the Pega as-a-Service Expert Circle to access additional webinars, resources, and community discussions on Pega Cloud topics. You can also visit the Q&A discussion thread for this webinar — and if you have additional questions that weren't covered during the live session, don't hesitate to post them there. Our experts are standing by!
