What is disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS)?
With the threat of everything from cyberattacks to extreme weather growing, business continuity is more important than ever. Anything that impacts your digital infrastructure has the capacity to bring your business to a grinding halt, knocking out everything from your ability to access and share files to communicating between office locations. Yet despite the high costs of such downtime, many organisations lack a comprehensive disaster recovery plan to mitigate this, and continue to operate seamlessly.
The complex nature of disaster recovery and the hardware required means that maintaining your own facilities and systems isn’t always the best use of resources. Instead, businesses are increasingly looking to cloud-native resilience strategies, and more specifically disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). Here’s everything you need to know about DRaaS: what it is, how it functions, how it protects business continuity, and whether your organisation needs it.
What is DRaaS?
Disaster recovery as a service, commonly referred to as DRaaS, is a form of business continuity that backs up company data and applications to a secure, remote cloud environment. If a disaster occurs, all of your files are backed up on remote servers, allowing you to seamlessly resume operations with minimal data loss or downtime.
Like other ‘as a service’ models, DRaaS is a way to avoid expensive hardware investments by outsourcing disaster recovery to a specialist IT managed service provider. Rather than buying and maintaining your own backup servers, this process is handled for you, with a mirrored version of your files and software maintained in an isolated silo.
This isolation means that not only are you protected from hardware failure on your premises, but also from cyber threats. If your systems are taken down by a ransomware or phishing attack, you can quickly and safely resume working from the backups without having to worry about those systems also being breached by cyber criminals.
DRaaS can also be combined with a physical disaster recovery suite. If some or all of your employees are not in a position to continue working from home in the event of hardware failure, providers like Sota can offer access to a disaster recovery suite containing PCs with access to your files and software, as well as high speed internet access. This can further minimise downtime even in the event of a major disaster like a fire or water ingress.
While maintaining your own backups used to be simpler, the heavy integration of local and cloud software in many modern businesses makes it expensive and unwieldy today. Building and maintaining a dedicated, secondary data centre with redundant hardware, network connections, and power supplies is beyond all but the largest organisations. DRaaS opens this up to every business with a scalable and accessible subscription service.
Our decades of experience and independent data centre campus at the Kent Science Park allow us to provide sovereign, managed DRaaS capabilities. We can ensure that your secondary environment is properly managed and hosted within high-security facilities, all monitored around the clock by experienced UK engineers.
How does DRaaS ensure business continuity?
Business continuity is more important today than it ever has been. Depending on where you live in the world, there may be a physical component to this, as extreme weather in particular is putting more facilities at risk. But the greatest shift in this area is cybercrime. AI is making it easier than ever to initiate attacks, probing organisations’ networks for weaknesses and targeting individual employees. All of this means that, should the worst happen, your systems and software could become non-functional at the drop of a hat.
Backing up your data to a separate server or drives used to be enough for many organisations. Yet the reality of modern business is that data is too numerous and too important to adequately protect in this way. With many companies subscribing to half a dozen or more cloud services, and with data being held across dozens or hundreds of devices, the only viable way to protect it is to back it up to the cloud.
DRaaS provides effective business continuity by focusing on two key metrics known as a recovery point objective (RPO) and a recovery time objective (RTO). The recovery point objective is the maximum age of files that need to be recovered from backup storage to resume your normal operations. As even losing one day’s worth of transactions, emails, and client records could be catastrophic, DRaaS aims to shorten this window by using continuous data replication, backing up data in intervals of minutes or seconds.
A recovery time objective, on the other hand, is how quickly your data needs to be restored after a disruption. If your primary servers go down and your IT team has to manually rebuild your virtual machines from scratch, this RTO could stretch into several days. DRaaS aims to limit your RTO by keeping pre-configured virtual machine images standing by in the cloud, ready to boot up immediately.
When a disruption occurs, the aim of DRaaS is to quickly funnel your workforce into these cloud-hosted virtual desktops and apps. Your employees can log in from home, a temporary office, or a remote location, and immediately find their familiar files and software completely intact. Once your primary site is restored, DRaaS then helps to synchronise any new data created during the outage back to your main servers before you switch back over.
Do you need DRaaS?
Whether or not you need DRaaS ultimately comes down to the financial and operational damage unplanned downtime would cause. This is quantifiable not just in the capabilities of your IT team, or the cost of repairs, but the potential lost revenue, employee wages, contractual penalties, and reputational damage you could incur from downtime or data loss.
If your organisation relies heavily on processing transactions, online collaboration tools, or database access, even a brief outage could be paralysing. This is especially true for more heavily regulated industries like legal services, financial management, healthcare, or logistics, where regulatory requirements around data security and availability are higher. Data security in these instances might be mandatory for compliance, contracts, and even insurance reasons.
DRaaS is also worth considering if your internal IT team is already stretched by daily tasks. If you’re struggling to effectively manage things like support tickets or routine maintenance, the process of designing, testing, and maintaining an in-house disaster recovery plan might be beyond your capabilities. We’ve seen internal disaster plans remain unimplemented for years simply because teams lacked the capacity to test them.
DRaaS solves this problem by offloading the entire management, monitoring, and regular testing framework to a dedicated provider. At Sota, we integrate our business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities with our broader cyber resilience services. Rather than just supplying you with software, we build bespoke disaster recovery strategies that align perfectly with your risk profile.
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By combining independent, regional data centre infrastructure with a family-business commitment to service, we ensure that if the unexpected happens, your business does more than survive the disruption: it continues to operate unimpeded, and with absolute confidence. To learn more, visit our Disaster Recovery page, or get in touch with us today.