c1.16 Evaluate workload resilience
Security owns availability (the A in CIA): measure whether your critical workloads can meet the business's recovery objectives, and close the gaps you find. AWS Resilience Hub is the managed way to assess and track this.
Implementation guidance
Availability is a security responsibility
Resilience is often run day-to-day by infrastructure teams, but security owns the outcome: ensuring critical workloads can withstand failures to the level the business expects — the Availability in the CIA triad. After a major outage, the board typically holds the CISO accountable for not surfacing the risk in time.
Measure the gap with Resilience Hub
AWS Resilience Hub assesses whether your critical applications can meet their RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) targets, so you can compare current resilience against the SLA the business requires. Where there is a gap, it estimates the cost of the architecture changes needed to close it (for example additional Availability Zones or Regions, replicas), giving the business the data to decide: invest in the improvement, or accept the risk and adjust the requirement. AWS has since introduced a next generation of Resilience Hub with a generative-AI-assisted SRE resilience journey; the original Resilience Hub also remains available.
Make it a decision, not a perception
The key value is turning "are we resilient enough?" into a data-backed answer. Multi-AZ vs multi-Region, when to add replicas — these should follow the documented requirements, not assumptions. See disaster recovery for the deeper phase.
How to validate
- Have you assessed your critical workloads with Resilience Hub?
- Do you have clear availability requirements (RTO/RPO, SLA) from the business?
- Is each critical workload actually able to deliver the required SLA, and is there a remediation plan for the gaps?
Threats addressed
- Systems fail over time. Deciding what to run multi-AZ vs multi-Region and when to add replicas should be driven by measured requirements (RTO/RPO), not perception — otherwise a critical workload may not survive an outage.
- In a major outage of a critical application, leadership often holds the CISO accountable for not identifying the resilience risk and driving improvement in time, even when another team runs resilience day-to-day.
AWS services
AWS Resilience Hub Pricing
AWS Resilience Hub can be tried free for 6 months for your first 3 applications, after which it is billed per application per month. See Resilience Hub pricing.