For those businesses that struggle to have the time or expertise to develop and implement a disaster recovery plan, there is another option—Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). DRaaS is offered by some managed IT services providers. It allows you to hand the responsibility for your data backup and business continuity to a trusted partner. Someone who has both experience and expertise in backup and disaster recovery.

It’s important to understand, too, that data backup and disaster recovery are not the same thing. It’s not enough to back your data up to an offsite location or the cloud and expect to have everything you need if a disaster occurs. You won’t. A data backup, even if it’s a backup of your entire system is still just a backup and won’t guarantee that you can recover your systems in the event of a disaster.

Disaster recovery works with data backups. The real difference between data backups and recovery or continuity is in how easy it is to restore data to your operating environment. That’s the value of having a trusted partner that manages the process for you. A well-managed DRaaS plan can have your systems back to a pre-disaster state in the shortest amount of time, sometimes in only a few hours. A team of DRaaS specialists provided by your managed IT services provider does all the heavy lifting for you. They’ll handle all the reconnects, pulling your data into the newest version of your systems, and if necessary, they can keep you running in the cloud until your hardware is replaced. It will be as if nothing ever went sideways with your IT infrastructure in the first place.