Data Protection & Continuity
Disaster Recovery as a Service
Cloud-based standby infrastructure that brings your critical systems back online within an agreed window when the primary site is unavailable, with runbooks that have been tested rather than written and filed.
Failover that has been rehearsed
- Failover rehearsals, not theory
- TestedFailover rehearsals, not theory
- Recovery objectives
- Per-systemRecovery objectives
- Testing without production risk
- IsolatedTesting without production risk
Backup answers the question of whether your data survives. Disaster recovery answers a harder one: how long the business is unable to operate. A company can hold perfect backups and still be out of action for a fortnight if there is nowhere to restore them to and no documented plan for who does what.
Disaster Recovery as a Service maintains a standby copy of your critical systems in cloud infrastructure, continuously replicated from production. When the primary environment is lost, whether through hardware failure, ransomware, fire or flood, those systems are started in the cloud and users reconnect to them.
The part that matters most is rehearsal. We run scheduled failover tests in an isolated network so the process is proven, the runbook is corrected where reality differs from the plan, and your team has actually done it before the day it counts.
What is included
- Continuous replication of critical servers to standby cloud infrastructure
- Agreed recovery time and recovery point objectives per system
- Isolated test failovers that do not disrupt production
- Documented, version-controlled runbooks naming who does what
- Network, DNS and VPN cutover planning so users can actually connect
- Failback procedures to return to primary once it is restored
- Post-test reports recording what worked and what was corrected
What you get out of it
- A recovery time you have measured, not estimated
- A plan your team has rehearsed rather than read
- Continuity of operations through site-level loss
- Evidence of a tested plan for insurers, regulators and clients
Why untested plans fail
The failures we see during first-time tests are rarely dramatic. A firewall rule that was never replicated. An application that will not start because its licence server is on the site that just went down. A DNS record with a twenty-four-hour cache. A runbook that names an engineer who left last year.
None of these are hard problems, but each of them adds hours to a recovery, and you only find them by actually running the test. That is why rehearsal is built into the service rather than sold as an extra.
Ransomware changes the calculation
Traditional disaster recovery assumed the primary site was lost cleanly. Ransomware is different: the environment still exists, but it is compromised, and failing over to a replica of a compromised environment simply moves the problem.
We design recovery points so that you can return to a known-clean moment before compromise, and we isolate the recovery environment during validation so that a dormant infection cannot spread from the restored systems into a clean network.
Where this fits
A single site holds everything critical
If one building, one server room or one hypervisor cluster going down would stop the business, that concentration is the risk DRaaS is designed to remove.
You have a DR plan nobody has ever executed
An untested plan is a document, not a capability. We test it, find the parts that do not survive contact with reality, and correct them.
A client or regulator requires proof of continuity
Enterprise customers increasingly require evidence of tested disaster recovery in supplier due diligence. We produce it as a standard output.
Frequently asked questions
- How is this different from backup?
- Backup preserves your data. Disaster recovery preserves your ability to operate. Backup is the insurance policy; disaster recovery is the spare vehicle already fuelled and ready. Most organisations need both, and they are designed differently.
- How often should failover be tested?
- At minimum annually, and we recommend twice yearly for systems the business genuinely cannot run without. Tests are isolated, so they do not interrupt live operations.
- What does this cost to run when nothing has gone wrong?
- Standby resources are billed at a reduced rate while dormant and only scale to full compute cost during a failover or test. This makes continuous readiness far cheaper than maintaining a duplicate physical site.
Ready to move on Disaster Recovery as a Service?
We will scope it against your actual environment, not a generic package, and give you a fixed price before any work starts.