Disaster Recovery as a Service for Small Business

Disaster recovery used to mean buying a second office or data center with duplicate hardware. For most small businesses, that was never affordable. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) changes that by replicating your critical systems to a cloud provider.

How DRaaS works:

- Your servers, applications, and data are replicated continuously or on a schedule to a cloud environment.

- If your primary site goes down (fire, flood, hardware failure, cyberattack), you fail over to the cloud copy.

- Users connect to the cloud environment while you recover the primary site.

- Once the primary site is stable, you fail back.

What to evaluate in a DRaaS provider:

- Recovery point objective (how recent the replicated data is).

- Recovery time objective (how fast systems come up after failover).

- Testing — can you run a disaster recovery test without disrupting production?

- Support during an actual event — who manages the failover?

DRaaS does not replace backups. Backups recover files; DRaaS recovers systems and keeps the business running during downtime. Use both.