DISASTER RECOVERY BY DESIGN: BUILDING RESILIENT ORACLE DATABASE SYSTEMS IN CLOUD AND HYPERCONVERGED ENVIRONMENTS

Abstract

Disaster recovery (DR) planning has become a critical component of enterprise IT strategy, especially as organizations transition to hybrid infrastructures that combine public cloud and hyperconverged environments. Oracle Database, widely used in mission-critical applications, requires tailored DR solutions that meet stringent recovery objectives while accommodating diverse deployment models. This paper presents a comprehensive, vendor-neutral framework for designing resilient Oracle Database systems across Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), third-party cloud providers (e.g., AWS, Azure), and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platforms such as Nutanix and VMware vSAN. Leveraging technologies like Oracle Data Guard, Autonomous Database backups, snapshot replication, and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) automation, the proposed architecture addresses both traditional and modern DR requirements. A case study from a hybrid healthcare enterprise demonstrates measurable improvements in Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO), while maintaining compliance with HIPAA and SOX standards. The framework emphasizes proactive failover design, continuous observability, and cross-platform compatibility, offering organizations a scalable blueprint for operational resilience. This research contributes a novel synthesis of Oracle-native and infrastructure agnostic DR capabilities, supported by real-world metrics and architectural patterns. It is intended to benefit the broader IT and DBA community by providing actionable guidance, reusable templates, and performance benchmarks that can be adapted across industries, including government, banking, and healthcare.