Disaster Recovery Planning Best Practices
The Disaster Recovery Planning eBook provides key insights and best practices for protecting critical data and ensuring business continuity under any circumstance.
unitrends disaster recovery as a service (draas)
DRaaS Keeps Your Business Running When It Matters Most
Eliminate downtime and maintain continuity in the face of disaster with fully managed, white-glove disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) from Unitrends. Ensure rapid recovery with the industry’s only 1-hour recovery time SLA guaranteed.
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Effortlessly Recover Critical Systems and Applications
When disaster strikes, time is of the essence. Unitrends DRaaS is a complete, white-glove managed service designed to make disaster recovery seamless. Unitrends performs all services required to install, manage, failover, and recover key business operations in the event of a disaster. This all-in-one service combines exhaustive protection, robust automation, and top-of-the-line support to deliver cloud DRaaS at an affordable and predictable cost.
Comprehensively Protect Physical, Virtual, and Application Workloads
Ensure resilience of your mission critical systems. Unitrends provides complete protection for physical servers, virtual servers, and applications. Whether it's a single server or your entire IT environment, we'll be ready to rapidly spin up your workloads in the secure Unitrends cloud.
Rely on 24/7/365 Disaster Recovery Services and Support
Your dedicated Unitrends DRaaS team is on standby 24/7/365 to help you with the disaster recovery process whenever you need it. We stay ready to execute your DR runbook and spin up your mission-critical systems at any time to help you meet even the most ambitious recovery objectives.
Reduce Complexity and Recover Confidently with Powerful Automation
Unitrends Recovery Assurance automatically tests your DR runbook in the cloud down to the application level for recovery confidence. You will receive comprehensive, easy-to-digest reports for evidence of recoverability, as well as benchmarked recovery time and recovery point objects to ensure alignment with your SLAs.
Save Money and Resources with a Cost-Effective Solution
Unitrends DRaaS provides full-service disaster recovery at a cost significantly lower than building and managing your own DR site. A transparent, flat-rate pricing structure allows for straightforward and predictable forecasting of DR costs. Never pay for ingress, egress, or DR testing.
Eliminate the Fear and Costs Associated with Downtime
It's no secret that uptime and resource availability play a critical role in the success of modern businesses. The challenge of overcoming downtime is one that organizations are faced with every day and one that is quite alarming when you look at the costs associated with it. In fact, a study by Ponemon Institute once found that a single minute of downtime costs an average of $14,000 per minute, or just shy of $850,000 per hour.
Downtime can be caused by a number of factors including human error, hardware failure, cyber threats, and natural disasters, just to name a few. Fortunately, Unitrends DRaaS is tailored to the unique needs of your business to get you back up and running as quickly as possible. Chat with a solutions expert to learn how you can achieve ultimate resilience with the most differentiated DR service in the industry.
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Unitrends DRaaS Has Your Back Every Step of the Way
Unitrends DRaaS is truly a white-glove, hands-free disaster recovery service. Our team of experts will handle everything throughout the entire process; from backup and replication to recovery and failback, we've got you covered.
Unitrends DRaaS Has Your Back Every Step of the Way
1
Backup Your Business
Start the process by backing up your mission critical data with a Unitrends Recovery Series Appliance or Unitrends Backup Software at your primary site. Pair your appliance with Unitrends Forever Cloud for secure offsite retention and DRaaS.
2
Replicate to the Unitrends Cloud
Once you have your cloud contract, use the unique key to pair your local appliance with your dedicated cloud target. Using Backup Copy jobs, replicate critical data to the Unitrends Cloud on a schedule that suits your Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
3
Enroll Workloads in DRaaS
Determine which workloads you want to enroll in DRaaS and at which service level (Premium, Elite, Standard or Unlimited). You'll work closely with our onboarding team to build out a custom disaster recovery runbook and DR requirements.
4
Automated DR Testing Begins
Unitrends DRaaS includes automated DR runbook testing in an isolated environment to benchmark RTO & RPO actuals and application-level performance testing as defined during onboarding. Regular testing ensures your DR plan works as expected.
5
Ongoing Monitoring & Recovery Validation
The Unitrends team performs all monitoring and management of the cloud environment. Results from automated DR tests are reported to customers as proof of recoverability. In addition, you may use a declaration event for manual testing as needed.
6
Need to Declare a Disaster?
Initiate a full or partial spin up of your enrolled workloads by placing a quick, simple phone call to Unitrends Support from an authorized contact at your organization. Our team is ready 24/7/365 to establish your DR environment in the cloud.
7
Run Invisibly in the Unitrends Cloud
Once spun up, you'll be provided secure network access to protected workloads in the Unitrends Cloud. We'll continue to take backups while you're running out of the DR site for seamless failback when you're ready to return to your local site.
8
Restore and Recover
Once notified that you're ready to failback, our team will ship your encrypted backup data overnight to your local site. Unitrends tears down the cloud environment and updates your DR runbook to be ready for a future declaration event.
Choose a DRaaS Solution to Meet Your Recovery Objectives
Unitrends DRaaS offers a range of service levels to meet the unique needs of your business. Protected systems may be enrolled at the same level of service, or at different levels, depending on the criticality of the workloads and your business requirements. Unlike public cloud solutions, Unitrends DRaaS protects your critical workloads with minimal effort and guaranteed recovery SLAs.
Premium DRaaS
- Contractually guaranteed 1-hour RTO SLA
- Full failover for protected systems
- Weekly Recovery Assurance testing and automated reports for evidence of compliance and recoverability
- Configured per server or per VM
Elite
DRaaS
- Contractually guaranteed 24-hour RTO SLA
- Full failover for protected systems
- Monthly Recovery Assurance testing and automated reports for evidence
- Configured per server or per VM
Standard DRaaS
- "Best effort" SLA
- Full failover for protected systems at low cost
- Onboarding testing for evidence of recoverability
- Configured per server or per VM
Unlimited DRaaS
- "Best effort" SLA
- Full failover for unlimited systems at low cost
- Onboarding testing for evidence of recoverability
- Configured based on protected capacity of your Forever Cloud account
Get in Touch with a Disaster Recovery Expert
Unitrends DRaaS is tailored to the unique needs of your business. Chat with a knowledgeable representative to learn more about our various service levels and see how simple disaster recovery can be.
Request a DemoLearn More About Disaster Recovery as a Service
Still not sold on the value of disaster recovery as a service? Explore these resources to gain a better understanding of what DRaaS is all about and how it helps alleviate a key pain point faced by many organizations.
The State of Backup and Recovery Report 2025
The Unified Backup Survey Report 2025 sheds light on the current trends in backup and recovery and how they are reshaping the data protection landscape.
Top 5 Critical Reasons IT Teams Prioritize Business Continuity
This checklist highlights the top five reasons IT teams need a business continuity solution to reduce downtime and prevent disruptions. Download the checklist to learn more.
Start Protecting Your Workloads Today
Don't leave your business vulnerable to the unexpected. Learn how Unitrends DRaaS can safeguard your critical data and ensure resilience in the face of any disaster.
Schedule a DemoFrequently Asked Questions About DRaaS
DRaaS, or Disaster Recovery as a Service, is a cloud-based solution that provides businesses with a way to recover their IT infrastructure and data in the event of a disaster. This type of service allows businesses to quickly restore their systems after an outage or disaster, minimizing the downtime and reducing the impact on their operations.
In traditional disaster recovery solutions, businesses would typically have to invest in expensive hardware and software to replicate their infrastructure and data to a secondary site or location. However, with DRaaS, this process is simplified and managed by a third-party service provider.
With DRaaS, businesses can ensure that their critical systems and data are protected and can be quickly restored in the event of a disaster.
No business is immune to data loss or downtime — a harsh reality. Statista reports nearly 52 million data breaches in the second quarter of 2022.
According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2022, the average data breach cost is now $4.35 million. Data loss and downtime can not only cost your business financially but can also bring it to a standstill. Therefore, a robust disaster recovery plan is a prerequisite for businesses today.
DRaaS enables large and small businesses to implement a reliable disaster recovery solution that ensures business continuity no matter the circumstances. Additionally, DRaaS providers do the heavy lifting, reducing the stress and burden on the users. With DRaaS, failover to the secondary DR site is almost instant. This enables businesses to quickly resume operations following a disruptive incident with minimum to no downtime.
DRaaS works by replicating critical data and systems to a secondary location, typically in the cloud. This secondary location serves as a backup that can be used to quickly restore services in the event of a disaster, such as a natural disaster, cyberattack, or hardware failure.
The process typically begins with the DRaaS provider working with the business to identify their critical systems and data. The IT service provider will then design and implement a disaster recovery plan that outlines how the data and systems will be replicated and restored in the event of a disaster.
The provider will then regularly back up the data and systems to the secondary location, using a variety of methods, such as replication, snapshots, or backups. The frequency of backups can be customized to meet the business’s specific needs and recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs).
If a disaster occurs, the DRaaS provider will help the business failover to the secondary location, ensuring that critical systems and data are quickly restored. The provider will also provide testing and verification of the disaster recovery plan to ensure that it is working effectively and can be relied upon in the event of a disaster.
Overall, DRaaS provides businesses with a cost-effective and efficient way to protect their critical systems. It also ensures that they can quickly recover and resume operations.
DRaaS eliminates the burden of planning, implementing, maintaining, and testing disaster recovery by outsourcing critical functions to disaster recovery experts. Capabilities will vary by DRaaS provider, but a quality service should be equipped to:
- Host and recover a wide range of physical workloads, virtual workloads, and applications
- Perform disaster recovery testing to ensure recoverability
- Distribute reports detailing test results and compliance with SLAs
- Provide IPSec VPN tunnels or site-to-site VPN to connect with recovery infrastructure
- Offer 24/7/365 white glove service for a hands-free disaster recovery experience
DRaaS offers a more economical, reliable and faster disaster recovery alternative to in-house DR solutions. Some of the key benefits of DRaaS include:
Cost
DRaaS can be much more affordable than building your own disaster recovery infrastructure, which requires a large capital investment. DRaaS providers provide the infrastructure and resources for disaster recovery to a secondary site. This ensures significant cost savings in the long run.
Saves time and effort
DRaaS providers manage, update and protect the infrastructure for DR needs, saving you and your team substantial time and effort. Your IT team can use the time and effort typically spent researching, implementing and testing disaster recovery plans for other projects.
Flexible and scalable
With an in-house disaster recovery solution, you may not use some of the storage space but still pay for it. However, with a cloud-based solution like DRaaS, you only pay for what you use. DRaaS is also highly flexible and scalable — you can easily upgrade your service as per your company’s needs.
Faster recovery
Unlike traditional disaster recovery, DRaaS solutions ensure a speedier recovery. This means your business can quickly resume normal operations (often within minutes) following a disaster.
Access to expert IT support
Outsourcing DR responsibilities to a DRaaS provider eliminates the need to hire additional IT staff. Reputed DRaaS providers like Unitrends provides 24/7/365 support — just a phone call away if the need arises.