This article outlines the key concepts and terms used in CloudRanger.

Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the point in time in the past to which you can recover data when a disaster occurs. In other words, RPO defines the amount of data the organization can afford to lose during a disaster.

For example, the organization has an RPO of 24 hours, and the backup is scheduled daily at 8 PM. If a disaster occurs at 7.59 PM, you can recover data that was backed up on the previous day at 8 PM. However, you lose the data generated after the last backup.

Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the amount of time you set for your application to recover from the point-in-time the disaster occurs. In other words, RTO defines the maximum tolerable outage. The application must be restored within its defined RTO to ensure business continuity.

For example, the organization has an RTO of 30 hours. When a disaster occurs, the organization must recover all its critical IT services within 30 hours from the point in time the disaster occurs.

An Amazon Web Services (AWS) account allows you to establish a formal relationship with AWS. With the AWS account, you can access the AWS account resources and Web services to the fullest. When you sign up for AWS, the AWS account is automatically signed up for all services in AWS. You are charged only for the services that you use.

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is an encrypted machine image stored in the Amazon Storage, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service. For more information, see Amazon Machine Image.

An IAM role is an IAM entity that defines a set of permissions for making AWS service requests. IAM roles are not associated with a specific user or group. Instead, trusted entities assume roles, such as IAM users, applications, or AWS services such as EC2.

A VPC is a section of the AWS Cloud specific to the AWS account. You can launch the AWS resources, such as EC2 instances, in the virtual network. For more information, see Amazon Virtual Private Cloud.

An environment is a collection of AWS network and security resources for an application within a single region. It simplifies the generation of dependencies for an application, ensuring it can be updated or cloned seamlessly. Environments can be cloned across your AWS accounts and regions.