Disaster Recovery Cost Calculator

Disaster recovery spend should be justified by the downtime it prevents, and this calculator prices both sides of that trade-off. It first converts your annual revenue into a per-hour figure (annual revenue ÷ 8,760 hours) and multiplies that by your expected outage duration and outage frequency to estimate the annual cost of downtime if you had no DR plan at all. DR infrastructure cost is then derived from your Recovery Time Objective (RTO — how fast you must be back up): the calculator applies a cost multiplier against your primary infrastructure spend based on standard DR tiers — hot standby for RTO under 1 hour costs roughly 90% of primary infrastructure, warm standby (1–4 hours) roughly 50%, cold standby (4–24 hours) roughly 20%, and backup-only (24+ hours) roughly 8%.

A separate multiplier prices data replication based on your Recovery Point Objective (RPO — how much data loss is acceptable): continuous replication (under 6 minutes of possible loss) is the most expensive at roughly 15% of primary infrastructure cost, tapering down to about 1% for daily-or-slower replication. Adding DR infrastructure and replication costs together gives your total DR spend, and subtracting that from the downtime cost it avoids gives the net annual benefit and ROI — a positive net benefit means the DR investment pays for itself in avoided outage losses. The tier multipliers are industry rules of thumb, not quotes from any specific vendor, so use this to compare RTO/RPO tiers against each other directionally, then get real quotes for your actual infrastructure before committing budget.