What Is Disaster Recovery as a Service?
2026-10-26
If your data center or IT infrastructure is affected by a major incident — or even a full-scale disaster — Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is typically the last line of defense. The service is based on the use of backup computing resources, usually at a geographically remote site, in the event that the primary data center becomes unavailable.
In general, disaster recovery makes it possible to restore virtual machine images, mission-critical data, and other elements of the operating environment within a relatively short time—from minutes to hours. By contrast, other methods of recovering IT infrastructure can take days or even weeks. DRaaS enables organizations to quickly—and, ideally, seamlessly—switch users to a backup data center and then return them to the primary site once the incident has been resolved.
For users, two parameters are particularly important: the Recovery Time Objective (RTO), which defines the maximum acceptable service downtime, and the Recovery Point Objective (RPO), which defines the amount of data the company is willing to lose permanently in the event of a failure. The latter determines how frequently backups need to be created. Disaster recovery is not inexpensive, so these services are generally used only in the most critical environments, such as government and financial services.