Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery Frameworks for Business Continuity in Mission-Critical Saudi Organizations

Mission-critical Saudi organizations increasingly operate digital public services, healthcare platforms, payment channels, energy systems, logistics networks, and enterprise resource planning environments through cloud-enabled infrastructure. This review develops a governance-centered framework for cloud-based disaster recovery and business continuity in the Saudi context. The study integrates recent literature, national cloud and cybersecurity requirements, international resilience guidance, and practitioner evidence from 2020 to 2025. It argues that cloud disaster recovery should not be treated as a technical backup arrangement alone; rather, it should be positioned as a board-visible capability that links business impact analysis, data classification, sovereignty obligations, cyber resilience, and measurable recovery evidence. The paper advances five objectives: to clarify critical drivers of cloud recovery adoption, map recovery patterns to business criticality, align architecture choices with Saudi regulatory expectations, identify assurance metrics for continuity governance, and propose an implementation roadmap for mission-critical sectors. A structured integrative review method was used, combining database searches, regulatory analysis, thematic coding, and framework synthesis. The findings show that the strongest recovery posture emerges when organizations combine multi-zone design, immutable backup, zero trust access, continuous replication, tested failover, contractual accountability, and evidence-based reporting. The proposed framework supports Saudi entities seeking resilient, compliant, and economically rational continuity arrangements while avoiding overdependence on undocumented recovery assumptions.