VMs running in an organization’s VMware-based data center are continuously replicated to an S3-compatible object store or Azure Blob Storage (ABS). In the event of an incident at the on-premises data center, VMs and their data can be rehydrated and resume operation in a VMware-based recovery environment. While the VMs are running in the recovery environment, they continue to replicate data to the object store. After the on-premises data center is restored, the VMs and their data (including any new data generated by the VMs in the cloud data center) can return to their original data center without interruption (“live failback”).