You never know when a major incident will affect your business. Whether it’s a natural disaster, a power outage, or a cloud disruption, the ripple effects can be instant and global. These events can take your most essential consumer and enterprise services offline and degrade others. 

If the continuity of your analytics and AI is important to your business, any of these events turn into a live-fire drill. As the AI Data Cloud, Snowflake gives you the disaster recovery tools that ensure business continuity.

But the big questions are: in a rapidly changing landscape, how does Snowflake’s disaster recovery work? What tools and practices can you put in place to be prepared? How can you get started?

The Challenge: Resilience amidst uncertainty

Today’s digital economy is interconnected and fast-moving. Even a single isolated incident can cascade across thousands of applications and services, disrupting business processes and delaying critical decisions. 

For financial institutions and market infrastructure, regulators expect proven business continuity plans. And in healthcare organizations, ensuring data availability and regulatory compliance is critical. Many organizations have designed and tested Snowflake’s cross-region and cross-cloud capabilities; for example, DTCC has publicly described how it achieves data resiliency using Snowflake. 

How Snowflake enables cross-region & cross-cloud resilience

Snowflake’s cross-cloud technology layer, Snowgrid, enables a suite of crucial features designed to support you through a disaster recovery event:

Database & account replication

• Replicate both your data and account-level objects (users, roles, warehouses, integrations) to a secondary region or cloud with full integrity and consistency to meet your recovery objectives.

Failover groups

• Achieve point-in-time consistency across your production databases by grouping them all into a single failover group in your disaster recovery account. This ensures that, during a failover, every database is restored to the exact same moment so your business data is fully synchronized.

Client redirect

• Maintain a single, region-agnostic connection endpoint for your applications, enabling rapid cutover without code changes.

Centralized governance

• Keep your security and governance policies in sync across regions and clouds without additional configurations or setup.

Monitoring & lag visibility

• Real-time insights into replication status and lag, so you can make informed decisions during an incident.

These capabilities are not just technical features—they are the foundation of a resilient data strategy.

What “good” disaster recovery looks like in 2025

Leading organizations are raising the bar for disaster recovery. Alongside the best in class capabilities every plan should include are:

1. Clear tiering and targets: Not all workloads are equal. Define your recovery point objective and recovery time objective (RPO/RTO) by business impact, and align your replication strategy accordingly.

2. Comprehensive replication and failover: Protect both your data and your control plane—users, roles, and integrations—so you can recover quickly and securely.

3. Seamless application experience: Use Client Redirect to ensure your users and applications experience minimal disruption.

4. Operational sequencing: Restore ingestion and transformation pipelines first, then bring analytics and BI back online as data freshness allows.

5. Reduce cloud concentration risk: For organizations seeking maximum resilience, design for failover across cloud providers.

6. Evidence through testing: Regularly test your disaster recovery plan—regulators and boards expect proof, not just promises.

What to take away

Having single points of failure is a business decision and often an avoidable one. Snowflake’s disaster recovery toolset—replication, failover groups, Client Redirect, and cross-cloud promotion—exists to help you turn outages into non-events for your stakeholders. The organizations that successfully weather disruptions aren’t lucky; they’re prepared.