Key Takeaways:
- What it is: Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) delivers cloud-hosted failover for critical workloads, ensuring rapid recovery from ransomware, outages, or natural disasters.
- Why it matters: Cuts downtime from days to minutes, protects against data loss, and eliminates the need for a costly secondary data center.
- How it works with Veeam: Veeam-powered DRaaS combines immutable backups, automated orchestration, and service-provider expertise to meet aggressive RPO/RTO targets.
- Who benefits: SMBs, enterprises, and hybrid/multi-cloud environments needing scalable, compliant, and tested disaster recovery.
- Bottom line: A modern, cost-efficient way to keep your business running, even when the unexpected strikes.
Ransomware, hardware failures, and natural disasters all have one thing in common — they can stop your business in its tracks. In today’s threat landscape, recovery speed matters just as much as prevention. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) delivers an on-demand, cloud-hosted environment to failover critical workloads and keep operations running when the unexpected strikes.
Veeam-powered DRaaS takes this model further with immutable backups, orchestrated failover/failback, and continuous testing to meet aggressive recovery point (RPO) and recovery time (RTO) objectives. By shifting disaster recovery to a managed or hybrid cloud model, you remove the need for costly secondary sites, reduce IT complexity, and ensure workloads are protected across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.
Whether you’re an SMB looking to safeguard a few virtual machines or an enterprise protecting mission-critical, globally distributed workloads, DRaaS offers a scalable, cost-efficient way to recover quickly, maintain compliance, and minimize downtime.
What is DRaaS?
DRaaS is a cloud-based solution that enables businesses to replicate critical workloads to a service provider’s infrastructure. In the event of downtime, these workloads can be quickly restored, ensuring minimal disruption to operations.
Key characteristics of DRaaS include:
- Failover and failback: Secure and seamless transitions between primary and backup systems during outages, whether it’s one application or a full data center.
- Customizable service level agreements (SLAs): Tailored recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives (RTOs and RPOs) to help you meet business needs.
- Expert support: Access to skilled professionals who manage, monitor, and update DR systems.
- Documentation: Ensure DR plans are written down and updated as environments evolve.
Veeam Data Platform stands out for its ability to protect most workloads in both on-premises and cloud environments. Veeam Data Platform also supports backups, replicas, and continuous data protection (CDP) all in a single solution to allow organizations to meet workload-specific recovery objectives to ensure right-sized protection.
Why Businesses Are Adopting DRaaS
Here’s why more organizations are making the switch:
1. Simplifying DR
By leveraging the cloud, DRaaS removes the need for massive upfront hardware and software investments. Instead of overprovisioning resources “just in case,” you pay only for what you use and scale when you need it.
For IT teams, the difference is night and day. With DRaaS, service providers handle infrastructure, orchestration, and testing, so your internal staff can focus on innovation, security, and business growth rather than maintaining a DR site that might sit idle for years.
2. Ransomware Protection
When paired with immutable backups and air-gapped storage, DRaaS delivers a layered defense strategy that ensures you can quickly spin up clean copies of your environment, avoid paying ransoms, and keep your business moving.
According to the Veeam 2025 Ransomware Trends Report, 74% of organizations plan to leverage DRaaS for ransomware recovery by 2026. That’s because DRaaS enables rapid failover to a clean environment, minimizing downtime from days to minutes.
Customer story call-out – Eastern Ontario Health Unit:
“Ransomware infected and encrypted our entire on-prem IT infrastructure, including backups. HostedBizz performed DRaaS using Veeam replicas, and our critical systems were up and running in under two hours.”
Read the full case study.
3. Meeting Compliance Requirements
From healthcare to finance, compliance mandates aren’t optional and they extend to your disaster recovery strategy. Standards like HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, and SOX require not only that data be recoverable, but that recovery processes are documented, tested, and verifiable.
With DRaaS, you get built-in audit trails, automated reporting, and recovery validation. That means you can prove to regulators, and to your board, that you can meet your RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) targets, even under pressure.
4. Scalability
Your disaster recovery needs today might look very different in two years, or even six months. DRaaS makes scaling up (or down) easy. Whether you’re adding workloads, expanding into new regions, or migrating to hybrid and multi-cloud environments, you can adjust your DR footprint without costly CapEx.
Many providers also offer geographic redundancy, so your recovery site can be in a completely different region from your production environment, a critical advantage if your primary site is impacted by a regional disaster.
5. Reducing IT Complexity
Keeping an in-house DR environment running, with up-to-date hardware, tested failover processes, and secure connectivity, is a full-time job. DRaaS shifts that responsibility to experienced service providers who specialize in disaster recovery operations.
With experts managing replication, failover, compliance reporting, and routine testing, your IT team can redirect its time and budget toward projects that drive innovation, improve customer experiences, and strengthen your security posture.
Use Cases for DRaaS
Here are three common ways businesses are putting DRaaS to work.
Ransomware Recovery
When ransomware strikes, every minute counts. DRaaS allows you to:
- Failover to a clean, cloud-hosted replica of your environment
- Minimize downtime
- Avoid paying a ransom
- Preserve customer trust
When combined with immutable backups and air-gapped storage, DRaaS ensures you always have a safe, uncompromised copy of your data to restore from.
Step-by-step orchestration in action:
Disaster Recovery for SMBs
For many small and mid-sized businesses, traditional disaster recovery, with dedicated hardware, redundant data centers, and specialized staff, is simply too costly. DRaaS changes that.
By delivering enterprise-grade disaster recovery through a cloud service, SMBs gain access to the same resilience large enterprises rely on, without the capital expense. You pay for resources only when you need them, and your service provider manages the heavy lifting: infrastructure, replication, testing, and failover.
The result? Business continuity you can afford, whether you’re recovering from a server failure, regional power outage, or targeted cyberattack.
Hybrid and Cloud-Native Environments
Many organizations run workloads across a mix of on-premises, public cloud, and private cloud platforms. DRaaS supports this hybrid reality by protecting workloads wherever they reside. This gives you the flexibility to recover them to the most appropriate location.
Whether you need to failover a single application from on-prem to the cloud or shift an entire production environment from one cloud provider to another, DRaaS makes it possible without lengthy migrations or complex reconfigurations.
For organizations adopting cloud-native applications, DRaaS can also integrate with container orchestration platforms and cloud APIs.
How to Implement DRaaS
Moving to Disaster Recovery as a Service isn’t just a technology decision — it’s a business continuity strategy. Implementation works best when you follow a structured, step-by-step approach.
1. Assess Your Needs with a Business Impact Analysis (BIA)
Start by understanding exactly what’s at stake. A Business Impact Analysis helps you identify which systems and applications are critical to operations, the acceptable amount of downtime (Recovery Time Objective, or RTO), and how much data you can afford to lose (Recovery Point Objective, or RPO).
Your BIA should:
- Rank workloads by criticality — for example, “must recover in under 1 hour” vs. “can wait 24 hours.”
- Map dependencies between applications and systems.
- Identify compliance requirements that may dictate where and how data is stored and recovered.
This step creates the blueprint for your DRaaS configuration.
2. Select the Right Provider
Not all DRaaS offerings are the same. When evaluating providers, look beyond price to consider:
- Geographic redundancy: Does the provider have recovery sites in multiple regions to avoid single points of failure?
- Automation capabilities: Can they orchestrate failover/failback without manual intervention?
- Compliance readiness: Do they meet certifications like ISO 27001, SOC 2, HIPAA, or GDPR standards?
- Support models: Do you want fully managed DRaaS or self-service with provider assistance when needed?
Vetting providers for security certifications and transparent SLA terms is critical. You want to know they can deliver the RTO/RPO you’ve defined in your BIA.
3. Develop a Recovery Plan
A strong recovery plan goes beyond “flip the switch.” It should be a comprehensive, documented, step-by-step guide to restoring operations — tested, maintained, and accessible to all stakeholders.
Best practices include:
- Workload tiering — Classify workloads as critical, important, or non-essential so recovery prioritizes the right systems first.
- Automation integration — automate recovery plans, eliminating human error and speeding up response time.
- Clear runbooks — Outline exactly who does what during an outage, from initiating failover to notifying leadership.
4. Schedule Regular Testing
A DRaaS plan is only as good as its last test. Regular testing ensures your team, your provider, and your technology can deliver when it counts.
Testing should include:
- Tabletop exercises: Walk through the recovery plan without touching production systems.
- Partial failover drills: Test recovery of a subset of workloads to ensure replicas are working properly.
- Full failover simulations: Conduct a complete environment failover to validate end-to-end processes.
Frequent testing verifies RTO/RPO targets and helps identify gaps before they become real-world problems.
5. Train Your Team
Your team should know exactly how to respond, who to contact, and what steps to take when a disaster is declared.
- Assign clear roles and responsibilities in advance.
- Run “dress rehearsals” with both your internal team and your DRaaS provider to practice recovery under realistic conditions.
- Keep documentation and contact lists updated so no one wastes time during an actual event.
Steps to Implement DRaaS: Summary
| 1. Assess Your Needs with a Business Impact Analysis (BIA) | • Rank workloads by criticality • Map dependencies between applications and systems • Identify compliance requirements |
| 2. Select the Right Provider | • Geographic redundancy • Automation capabilities • Compliance readiness |
| 3. Develop a Recovery Plan | • Workload tiering • Automation integration • Clear runbooks |
| 4. Schedule Regular Testing | • Tabletop exercises • Partial failover drills • Full failover simulations |
| 5. Train Your Team | • Assign clear roles and responsibilities • Run “dress rehearsals” with both your internal team and your DRaaS provider • Keep documentation and contact lists updated |
Key Benefits of Veeam-powered DRaaS
With the right disaster recovery strategy, you can overcome disruptions and come back stronger. Veeam-powered DRaaS delivers a complete, secure, and flexible platform to protect and recover workloads wherever they run.
| Comprehensive Protection | Veeam-powered DRaaS safeguards all workloads, from physical and virtual machines to multi-cloud environments. Whether you’re protecting applications in your on-premises data center, workloads running in AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud, or a hybrid mix of both, Veeam provides consistent backup, replication, and recovery across the board. |
| Enhanced Security | Security is at the core of Veeam-powered DRaaS. Built with zero-trust architecture principles and aligned with NIST 2.0 cybersecurity standards, it ensures only authenticated, authorized users can initiate recovery operations. By combining immutable backup storage with air-gapped copies, your data remains protected from tampering, deletion, or encryption — even if attackers gain privileged access. Automated verification and secure restore options add another layer of defense. |
| Flexibility | You can choose the delivery model that fits your needs — from self-service control to fully managed disaster recovery. As your business grows, resources can be scaled up or down on demand, without costly CapEx. Whether you’re onboarding new workloads, expanding into new regions, or temporarily increasing capacity during a high-risk period, DRaaS adapts without slowing you down. |
| RPO Flexibility | You can achieve ultra-low RPOs – down to seconds – using Continuous Data Protection (CDP) for mission-critical workloads. Whether recovering from backups, replicas, or CDP, you can achieve your recovery objectives with Veeam Data Platform. |
| Industry-Leading Expertise | With a global network of 12,000+ Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) partners, you get unmatched experience in designing, deploying, and managing disaster recovery solutions. This partner ecosystem brings deep knowledge of industry-specific challenges, compliance mandates, and infrastructure nuances. |
Why DRaaS is the Future of DR
Disaster recovery is not a static, once-a-year checklist item. It’s a dynamic, business-critical capability that has to keep pace with cyberthreats, cloud adoption, and compliance demands. DRaaS delivers exactly that — and it’s why the model is becoming the default choice for modern organizations.
Operational Efficiency: Maintaining an on-premises DR environment can be resource-heavy and time-consuming. DRaaS frees internal IT teams to focus on innovation and strategic projects. The result is streamlined operations and a faster path from outage to recovery.
- Economics: Traditional DR comes with high capital expenses for duplicate hardware, facilities, and maintenance. DRaaS shifts those costs to a predictable operational model, letting you pay for resources only when you need them. This CapEx-to-OpEx shift makes enterprise-grade resilience accessible to more organizations, from SMBs to global enterprises.
- Increased Cyberthreats: Ransomware and targeted attacks aren’t slowing down. They’re getting faster, stealthier, and more damaging. DRaaS, combined with immutable backups and air-gapped storage, gives you the ability to failover to a clean, uncompromised environment without paying a ransom or risking reinfection.
- Regulatory Changes: Compliance requirements are evolving quickly, with more industries facing strict uptime, data protection, and recovery mandates. DRaaS helps you meet these standards by providing documented, tested recovery plans with auditable results, whether you’re working under HIPAA, GDPR, PCI DSS, or industry-specific regulations.
Bottom line: Disaster recovery can’t be an afterthought. DRaaS combines the agility of the cloud, the expertise of seasoned providers, and the proven resilience of Veeam-powered technology to deliver fast, secure, and compliant recovery now and for the future.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is DRaaS different from traditional disaster recovery?
Traditional DR often requires a dedicated secondary site, duplicate hardware, and significant in-house expertise. DRaaS delivers the same capabilities, failover, failback, orchestration, and testing, through a cloud-based service managed by a provider, reducing cost and complexity.
What’s the difference between RPO and RTO in DRaaS?
RPO (Recovery Point Objective): How much data you can afford to lose, measured in time between backups or replications.
RTO (Recovery Time Objective): How quickly you need systems restored after a disruption.
With Veeam-powered DRaaS and Continuous Data Protection (CDP), RPOs can be reduced to seconds and RTOs to minutes.
How often should I test my DRaaS plan?
Best practice is to test at least quarterly, with a mix of tabletop exercises, partial failovers, and full failover simulations. Regular testing validates RTO/RPO targets and ensures both your team and your provider are prepared for a real event.
Can DRaaS support hybrid and multi-cloud environments?
Yes. Veeam-powered DRaaS protects workloads across on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud platforms. This includes the ability to recover workloads to the same location or to an alternate environment for greater flexibility.