Beyond Backups: How DRaaS Is Redefining Cyber Resilience

Downtime isn’t just an inconvenience — it’s a risk to your business’s reputation, revenue and operations. Whether it’s because of cyberattacks, natural disasters or system failures, the tangible and intangible cost of being offline adds up fast.

The pressure is on IT to ensure continuity, resilience and recoverability without blowing up infrastructure costs or increasing the complexity of workflow processes.

That’s where Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) comes in.

Traditionally, disaster recovery meant maintaining a secondary data center — complete with hardware, software, networking, power and cooling — to mirror production environments. This approach was not only cost-prohibitive, but it also required constant maintenance, patching and hands-on oversight from already overextended IT teams.

DRaaS shifts the mode by leveraging cloud and managed services. Instead of managing your own standby infrastructure, a trusted third-party provider hosts and orchestrates a fully managed recovery environment offsite. If your primary systems go down due to a disaster, cyberattack or outage, DRaaS enables you to rapidly fail over critical workloads to a secure, cloud-based environment — minimizing downtime and keeping business operations running.

Unlike traditional disaster recovery, which typically involves more manual processes and slower recovery times, DRaaS offers faster recovery through automation, scalability on demand and pay-as-you-go pricing.

More organizations are turning to DRaaS because it offers:

• Speed to recovery: Continuous data protection (CDP) and virtualized environments allow near-instant recovery, often within minutes. No more lengthy delays from rehydrating data or rebuilding servers from scratch.
• Reduced capital expenditure: Eliminate the need for costly secondary data centers. With DRaaS, you only pay for compute resources when actively needed, like during testing or an actual failure. It also leverages secondary copies of backup data already stored in the cloud, further reducing capital spend. These immutable backup copies can instantly be turned into live, production-ready systems, offering a clean, secure environment to run critical workloads while your primary infrastructure is unavailable.
• IT resource optimization: Many IT teams are running lean, and maintaining a full DR environment in-house is a heavy lift. DRaaS solutions offload this complexity, providing you with managed infrastructure, support and testing so your team can focus on core business goals.
• Cyber resilience: With ransomware attacks on the rise, DRaaS is no longer optional. If your production systems are compromised, DRaaS lets you restore clean versions of your environment while forensic investigations proceed.

DRaaS solutions offer a lot of convenience and benefits, but they aren’t plug-and-play. Organizations can stumble without taking these key steps:

• Plan and document: Knowing which systems to bring up first is essential.
• Test frequently: If you don’t test it, you can’t trust it. Your organization should be testing your DRaaS capabilities annually.
• Effective orchestration: Without automation, recovery can be slow and error-prone. A good third-party partner will help you build orchestration into your DR workflows.

Choosing the right DRaaS partner makes a world of difference.

CDW works with leading platforms like Rubrik, Cohesity and Avarmar to name only a few, and we understand how to integrate them into your broader IT architecture and business continuity plan. We’re not just a partner; we’re a trusted extension of your IT team.

We’ll work with you to fully understand your environment, applications and dependencies, making it seamless to map, automate and test your recovery plan.

Many standalone DRaaS providers will stop at the platform; CDW brings both the environment and the experts. We have the expertise to approach DRaaS from a more holistic perspective, ensuring the most comprehensive disaster recovery plan for your business needs.

We often refer to DRaaS as your “break glass” solution. When something goes wrong, it’s the lever you pull to keep the business moving. With CDW, that panic moment becomes a coordinated, well-tested process that brings you back online swiftly and securely.