Disaster Recovery as a Service, Tested Before You Need It

Disaster recovery as a service, or DRaaS, is an outsourced arrangement where a provider owns the replication, storage, runbooks, testing, and execution of your recovery plan against agreed recovery time and recovery point objectives. The distinction from plain backup is accountability and testing: DRaaS commits to how long recovery takes and proves it on a schedule, rather than simply storing copies of data.

Backup is a copy of data. Disaster recovery is the tested process of returning a business to operation, which includes the data but also the order of restoration, the dependencies between systems, where staff work from, how customers are told, and who executes each step. Most businesses have backup. Considerably fewer have a recovery process anyone has actually run.

Quarterly is the standard we run, with additional testing after any material environment change such as a migration, a new line-of-business application, or an acquisition. Annual testing is common in the market and, in our experience, too infrequent: environments drift enough in twelve months that a plan validated last year is often wrong by the time it is needed.

Yes, and it is the most common recovery scenario we handle. Immutable storage prevents backups being altered or deleted within their retention window, retention is set beyond typical attacker dwell time so you can recover to a point before compromise, and our 24/7 Security Operations Center coordinates containment alongside recovery so you are not restoring into an environment the attacker still holds.

It changes the assumptions rather than the technology. A South Florida continuity plan has to work when the office is inaccessible, staff have evacuated to different states, and local connectivity is unreliable. That pushes toward cloud-hosted workloads, remote-first access, out-of-region backup copies, and a runbook that never assumes anyone can reach the building. We review these plans ahead of each season.

It depends on the recovery objectives and the data volume, because a four-hour RTO costs meaningfully more than a next-business-day RTO. Microsoft 365 Backup is priced at $0.15 per GB per month. Infrastructure disaster recovery is scoped against your business impact analysis. A free assessment establishes the objectives first, since pricing a recovery plan before agreeing what it must achieve is how businesses end up paying for the wrong thing.