A company wants to use the AWS Cloud to improve its on-premises disaster recovery (DR) configuration. The company's core production business application uses Microsoft SQL Server Standard, which runs on a virtual machine (VM). The application has a recovery point objective (RPO) of 30 seconds or fewer and a recovery time objective (RTO) of 60 minutes. The DR solution needs to minimize costs wherever possible. Which solution will meet these requirements?

The correct solution leverages a warm standby Amazon RDS for SQL Server database on AWS with AWS DMS using Change Data Capture (CDC). This meets the RPO of 30 seconds or fewer by continuously replicating data changes from on-premises to AWS, ensuring minimal data loss. A warm standby RDS instance is already running, significantly reducing the RTO to well within the 60-minute requirement, as it only needs to be scaled up or promoted. This approach also minimizes costs compared to active/active solutions. Incorrect options: Multi-site active/active with SQL Server Enterprise Always On is expensive due to Enterprise edition licensing and continuous resource utilization, exceeding cost minimization goals. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery (DRS) as a pilot light might meet RPO/RTO, but RDS with DMS is often more cost-effective for database-specific DR, and DRS is typically for entire VM replication. Daily backups to S3 would not meet the 30-second RPO, as it would result in up to 24 hours of data loss.