Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is the replication and hosting of physical or virtual servers by a third party to provide failover in the event of a man-made or natural catastrophe. Typically, DRaaS requirements and expectations are documented in a service-level agreement (SLA) and the third-party vendor provides failover to a cloud computing environment, either through a contract or on a pay-per-use basis. In the event of an actual disaster, an off-site vendor is less likely than the enterprise itself to suffer the direct and immediate effects, which allows the provider to implement the disaster recovery plan even in the event of the worst-case scenario: a total or near-total shutdown of the affected enterprise.

DRaaS vs. backup as a service (BaaS)

DRaaS fails over processing to the cloud so an organization can continue to operate during a disaster. The failover notice can be automated or manual. The DRaaS operation remains in effect until IT can repair the on-premises environment and issue a failback order.

In backup as a service, an organization decides which files it will back up to a BaaS provider’s storage systems. The customer organization is also responsible for setting up its RPO and RTO service levels, as well as its backup windows. A BaaS provider is only responsible for data consistency and restoring backed up copies of data.