Building distributed systems involves significant complexity, especially when maintaining operational continuity during events like cloud region outages or network partitions. Cross-data-center replication in Apache Kafka, particularly through tools like Kafka MirrorMaker, offers a solution by ensuring geo-redundancy, high availability, and disaster recovery across cloud regions. This approach is vital for seamless data flow and business continuity, minimizing downtime and latency for region-specific consumers. Kafka MirrorMaker enables near real-time data synchronization across clusters, enhancing system resilience and fault tolerance. Additionally, the integration of Kafka with tools like Confluent Cloud's Cluster Linking can make replication faster and more cost-effective. Key replication strategies include choosing between active-passive or active-active traffic handling, deciding whether to replicate within or across regions, and setting clear recovery objectives. Best practices for operating Kafka include monitoring configurations, minimizing replication lag, ensuring proper offset syncing, and maintaining topic configurations. For enhanced disaster recovery, replication should extend beyond data to include schemas and registry data, ensuring that consumers can deserialize messages correctly during failover scenarios. Various tools and strategies, such as Confluent Replicator, Kafka Connect, and custom solutions, are available to optimize replication, each with unique advantages and limitations.