Modern IT environments must operate 24/7, and even a brief downtime can cause serious business disruption. Small businesses report downtime costs anywhere from $8,000 to $100,000 an hour; this figure is even higher for enterprise organizations. But downtime impact can extend beyond significant financial loss toyour reputation and trust with customers.
That’s why operational resilience matters. Protecting the digital ecosystem is a critical pillar of organizational resilience, and modern disaster recovery for IT systems must deliver rapid recovery, automation, scalability, and seamless cloud integration to meet today’s business needs.
In this guide, we will review the best IT disaster recovery (DR) solutions to help IT professionals and MSPs and IT professionals maintain their client’s uptime and quickly bounce back from disruption. Here’s a roundup of the solutions reviewed:
- ConnectWise
- NinjaOne
- N-able
- Kaseya / Datto
- SyncroMSP
- Atera
- Itarian
- HaloPSA
- Arcserve ShadowProtect
- Azure Site Recovery
- VMware Live Recovery
- Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud
Key takeaways
- IT disaster recovery strategies are critical to ensure business continuity and prevent reputational and financial losses.
- The ideal DR solution should be highly scalable, flexible, and automated.
- ConnectWise strikes a strong balance between power and simplicity, making disaster recovery efficient and streamlined.
What is operational resilience in IT?
Operational resilience in IT means keeping core systems running, no matter what. It is a framework for business continuity that aims to maximize uptime and enable fast recovery from disaster, be it a cyberattack, system failure, or natural catastrophe.
IT disaster recovery, the backbone of this strategy, refers to the people, process that bring critical IT systems, data, and operations back online after a disruption. This approach often pairs with solutions like and MSP SaaS backup safeguard essential data and services wherever it lives (on-prem, cloud, hybrid)
What to look for in a disaster recovery solution
The right blend of IT disaster recovery services can be the difference between a brief interruption and a major crisis.
Consider solutions that blend the speed, flexibility, and scalability that meets the needs of your specific clients or organizations. Also, look for solutions that leverage automation of critical functions like testing and instant recovery to accelerate restoration and minimize downtime.
Top IT disaster recovery solutions
Here’s a breakdown of the best IT disaster recovery solutions:
1. ConnectWise
ConnectWise has a comprehensive IT disaster recovery portfolio to manage business continuity, backup, and disaster recovery across clients and environments.
x360Recover delivers fast restore options including local cache, bare metal recovery, and local instant recovery. along with its direct-to-cloud backup and cloud virtualization options for flexible, hardware-free DR
x360Cloud delivers robust, automated backup and recovery for Microsoft 365 (including Exchange, Teams, SharePoint, and more) and Google Workspace. With powerful search and rapid restore capabilities, it safeguards critical data, reduces the risk of data loss, and helps businesses meet compliance requirements with ease.
ConnectWise Cloud Backup ensures critical Microsoft 365 data is continuously protected and recoverable from accidental deletions, ransomware, or outages offering granular restore for emails, files, and collaboration tools.
ConnectWise Co-Managed Backup provides 24/7 NOC support to offload the tedious day-to-day backup monitoring and recovery tasks, creating opportunity for internal teams and the ability to offer DR at scale.
Centralized management and deep visibility across all solutions and third-party tools make strengthening IT disaster recovery planning easier to prevent data loss proactively rather than reactively. Automated processes will minimize downtime and scale disaster recovery coverage without adding operational overhead. ConnectWise provides the ideal balance of power and simplicity for MSPs delivering resilience as a service.
2. NinjaOne
NinjaOne is a remote monitoring management (RMM) and endpoint management suite with automated cloud backup capabilities to minimize damage in case of an incident or disaster.
NinjaOne's Backup and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) solution provides centralized tools for data protection and recovery across endpoints. It includes automated backup scheduling, file-level and image-based backups, and flexible retention policies. The platform supports local and cloud-based storage options and offers remote management capabilities for configuring and monitoring backups.
NinjaOne SaaS Backup offers automated, secure protection for cloud-based application data—specifically targeting platforms like Microsoft 365 (Emails, Contacts, Calendars, OneDrive, SharePoint) and Google Workspace.
The system integrates well with its endpoint management platform, and it’s easy to deploy and manage, making it an appealing option for smaller MSPs. However, its orchestration lacks depth compared to purpose-built disaster recovery platforms like ConnectWise.
3. N-Able
N-able offers a backup and IT disaster recovery option with Cove Data Protection. The solution supports fast recovery and multi-tenant management, with features like Standby Image and automated Recovery Testing to reduce costs over traditional appliances.
While flexible, N-Able’s solution is almost entirely focused on data protection and lacks advanced recovery orchestration or unified DR workflows.
4. Kaseya / Datto
Datto pairs local and cloud backup via SIRIS and ALTO to support hybrid DR strategies. It provides an all-in-one approach that combines features like instant virtualization and ransomware detection. Beware, though: It’s worth noting that compression is not applied before encryption, which can impact storage efficiency.
6. SyncroMSP
SyncroMSP combines RMM and professional services automation (PSA) functionalities with third-party backup integrations like Acronis or Backblaze. It's a cost-effective choice for smaller MSPs since it’s priced by user rather than endpoint and deeply integrated with Microsoft 365 suites.
However, according to some user reviews, SyncroMSP may miss the mark when it comes to customization options. Also, its disaster recovery capabilities heavily depend on external add-ons rather than native support.
7. Atera
Atera is a cloud-based RMM and PSA platform that focuses on simplicity and ease of use, making it particularly appealing to SMBs and smaller MSPs. A relatively basic product, it comes equipped with a mobile app, although some functionalities report unreliable performance.
Like SyncroMSP, Atera’s backup capabilities depend on integration with third-party vendors, making it less suitable for complex DR needs.
8. ITarian
ITarian is an RMM platform that provides endpoint management and security, ticketing, and network monitoring. It provides a decent degree of IT resilience through automated patching and maintenance and an efficient alerting system. However, ITarian’s backup features are basic, with no focus on DR strategies or rapid recovery at scale.
9. HaloPSA
Primarily a PSA and IT service management (ITSM) tool, HaloPSA is built for incident response, ticketing, and workflow tracking. DR and backup functions are supported only through integrations. It can contribute to an overall resilience strategy as a supplementary tool, but does not offer a dedicated solution for disaster recovery for IT systems.
10. Arcserve
Archserve ShadowProtect offers reliable image-based backup and fast recovery thanks to its ability to boot images into virtual machines instantly. It is highly scalable and allows prior testing to ensure all images work as intended on all endpoints, guaranteeing maximum reliability.
ShadowProtect mostly caters to small to midsize organizations. Larger, multi-site environments may find that it lacks advanced, centralized management features that are needed to maintain resilience at scale.
11. Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery is Microsoft’s native DR solution designed for hybrid cloud environments. It provides continuous replication of virtual machines, built-in orchestration, and easy failover for virtual machines.
For many, Site Recovery can be complex to use, requiring an experienced and dedicated team for all but the simplest disaster recovery scenarios. It’s also less useful for organizations outside the Azure ecosystem or working mostly within on-premise environments.
12. VMWare
VMware’s Live Recovery is a SaaS solution that offers live failover and rapid VM restoration on demand. Although quite powerful for ensuring continuity in VMware-centric environments, it is costly and has a narrow focus, leaving other elements of disaster recovery for IT systems to separate solutions.
13. Acronis
Acronis Cyber Backup protects on-prem systems, virtual machines, and SaaS applications like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. It offers automated backups, flexible local or cloud storage, encrypted data protection, and centralized management. The solution supports granular and full system restores, including instant recovery for virtual machines and bare-metal recovery to dissimilar hardware or virtual environments.
For MSP’s and IT professionals looking to scale protection, ConnectWise Co-Manage Backup can be paired with Acronis backup solutions to offer 24/7 management and monitoring.
Why choose ConnectWise?
With ConnectWise, we’ve consolidated the best-in-class tools for disaster recovery into a single, powerful on-prem and cloud Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) solution designed to help IT reduce silos and deliver unmatched data protection.
ConnectWise Data Protection solutions like X360 Recover, Cloud Backup, and Co-Managed Backup easily scales for cloud, hybrid, or on-premise protection, ensuring your MSP has the means to secure critical client data at scale, to get business up and running as quickly as possible in the event of an issue.
Resilience is a business imperative. Explore ConnectWise’s Backup and Disaster Recovery solutions firsthand by starting your on-demand demo today.
