Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS): what it is and when your organization needs it

Disaster recovery used to be expensive, complex, and available only to enterprises that could justify building a secondary data center. Replicating production systems to standby hardware, maintaining that standby environment continuously, and testing failover regularly required resources most organizations couldn’t commit.

Disaster Recovery as a Service changes the economics entirely. By delivering recovery infrastructure as a cloud-based managed service, DRaaS makes enterprise-grade disaster recovery accessible to organizations of any size, without capital investment in secondary hardware and without the operational overhead of maintaining a standby environment.

According to the 2026 Kaseya State of the MSP Report, 50% of MSPs reported year-over-year revenue growth in BCDR, and disaster recovery as a service is increasingly what clients are buying, not just backup. Datto, part of the Kaseya family, has been delivering BCDR solutions to MSPs for over 15 years, including the instant virtualization and cloud failover capability that defines modern DRaaS. Download the full MSP Report.

What is DRaaS?

DRaaS is a cloud-based managed service that replicates an organization’s servers, applications, and data to a third-party provider’s cloud infrastructure, enabling rapid failover and recovery when the primary environment is unavailable.

The key distinction from standard cloud backup is the completeness of the recovery capability. Cloud backup stores copies of data and enables data recovery. DRaaS replicates full system images, OS, applications, configurations, and data, and maintains the infrastructure needed to run those systems in the cloud without requiring the original hardware to be available. When a disaster occurs, the replicated systems can be activated in the DRaaS provider’s cloud within minutes, enabling business operations to continue from the cloud while the primary site is restored.

This capability directly addresses the RTO challenge. Conventional backup-to-cloud recovery can take hours to restore large environments. DRaaS failover is measured in minutes for well-configured implementations.

DRaaS vs. BaaS: understanding the distinction

BaaS (Backup as a Service) is a managed backup service. The provider manages the backup infrastructure, stores copies, and enables data recovery. BaaS focuses on data protection and recovery of individual files, databases, or systems. Recovery time is measured in hours, depending on the size and complexity of what’s being restored.

DRaaS provides full system recovery capability, the ability to run the production environment from the cloud. Recovery time is measured in minutes for prepared implementations.

The two serve different parts of the recovery requirement. An organization might use BaaS for standard backup and long-term retention, and DRaaS for the subset of mission-critical systems that require rapid failover. They can coexist within the same BCDR architecture, and for most mid-market clients, the right answer is both.

RTO and RPO: the metrics that determine your DR requirements

Two metrics drive every disaster recovery conversation.

RTO (Recovery Time Objective) is the maximum acceptable length of time that systems can be offline after a failure. An RTO of four hours means the business can tolerate up to four hours of downtime. Anything longer causes unacceptable operational or financial impact.

RPO (Recovery Point Objective) is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss, measured in time. An RPO of one hour means the business can tolerate losing up to one hour of data. Any more than that creates unacceptable exposure.

These two numbers define the DR solution required. An organization with an RTO of 30 minutes and an RPO of 15 minutes has requirements that conventional backup-and-restore cannot meet. DRaaS with continuous or near-continuous replication can.

Understanding each client’s actual RTO and RPO requirements, often numbers they haven’t formally defined, is where the DRaaS conversation productively starts. Many SMB clients are carrying implicit RTO and RPO requirements driven by their business model without ever having articulated them.

When DRaaS is the right choice

DRaaS is the appropriate solution when:

RTOs are measured in hours or less. If the business can’t afford more than a few hours of downtime for specific systems, conventional backup-and-restore approaches typically can’t meet that requirement. DRaaS with cloud failover capability can.

Physical site vulnerability is a concern. Natural disasters, facility failures, or extended power outages that make the primary site unavailable for days require the ability to operate from an alternative location. DRaaS provides that alternative without a second physical site.

Ransomware protection requires an independently maintained recovery environment. DRaaS implementations with immutable cloud replicas provide a clean recovery environment that ransomware targeting the primary site can’t reach. According to the Veeam 2025 Ransomware Trends Report, 74% of organizations plan to use DRaaS specifically for ransomware recovery by 2026.

Compliance requires documented recovery capability. Regulated industries (healthcare, finance, critical infrastructure) increasingly require demonstrated recovery capability with documented RTO performance. DRaaS providers typically offer SLA-backed RTOs that satisfy compliance documentation requirements.

MSPs need to deliver enterprise-grade recovery to SMB clients. DRaaS makes it commercially and operationally viable for MSPs to provide recovery capabilities that would be out of reach if the client had to build them independently.

How DRaaS works

Continuous replication captures changes to protected systems in near-real time, or at defined intervals, and transmits them to the DRaaS provider’s cloud infrastructure. Recovery points accumulate over the retention period, enabling point-in-time recovery to any captured state.

Cloud-hosted standby infrastructure maintains replicated system images in a state ready for activation. When failover is triggered, the cloud instances of protected systems are activated and become accessible to users and applications.

Failover and failback. Failover shifts operations to the cloud environment; failback returns them to the primary site once it’s restored. Both processes should be tested regularly to verify they work as expected and to measure actual RTO performance against the documented target.

Testing without disruption. A key advantage of cloud-based DRaaS is the ability to conduct recovery tests without affecting production operations. Test failovers in an isolated network environment validate that replicated systems function correctly before a real event occurs.

Datto BCDR, including Datto SIRIS and Datto Cloud Continuity, delivers this capability for MSPs: instant local virtualization for same-site recovery and cloud failover for site-level disaster scenarios. Explore Datto BCDR.

DRaaS for MSPs: the service and platform opportunity

For MSPs, DRaaS is both a service delivery opportunity and a positioning differentiator. The clients who most need DRaaS, SMBs running business-critical applications without the resources to build secondary infrastructure, are exactly the clients MSPs serve.

A few practical considerations for MSPs building or expanding DRaaS offerings:

Tiered service design. Not every system a client runs requires DRaaS-level protection. A tiered approach, DRaaS for tier-one critical systems, BaaS for everything else, is both more cost-effective and easier to sell. The conversation becomes “which of your systems can’t afford to be down for more than two hours?” rather than a binary DRaaS-or-nothing decision.

RTO commitment and testing. MSPs who can document tested RTO performance, not just promised RTO, are in a materially stronger position than those who make SLA commitments they’ve never validated. Scheduled test failovers, with documented results, become a service differentiator and a compliance asset for regulated clients.

Pricing model alignment. DRaaS is most naturally positioned as a per-device or per-workload monthly fee, with a clear value calculation: the cost of DRaaS coverage versus the cost of downtime for the protected systems. For most clients, the math is straightforward once the RTO requirement and the operational cost of an outage are on the table.

The Unified Cyber Resilience Portal

Managing backup across on-premises infrastructure, SaaS applications, endpoint devices, and cloud environments has historically meant managing multiple separate tools, each with its own console, alerting system, and recovery workflow. For MSPs managing multiple clients across all of these environments, that fragmentation creates significant operational overhead.

Kaseya’s Unified Cyber Resilience Portal, announced at Kaseya Connect 2026, consolidates on-premises, SaaS, endpoint, and cloud backup management into a single integrated interface, eliminating the tool sprawl that forces technicians to manage recovery across disconnected vendors. Powered by Kaseya Intelligence, the portal delivers AI-driven screenshot verification with greater than 99.9% accuracy, connected recovery workflows with intelligent prioritization, and compliance coverage including FIPS capabilities and FedRAMP readiness.

For MSPs delivering DRaaS across a client base, the practical impact is a single compliance evidence trail, unified alerting, and autonomous backup verification across all protected workloads, without the overhead of correlating results across multiple platforms.