Every piece of technology a business depends on carries a risk of downtime. Equipment failure, environmental disaster, cyberattacks, and employee mistakes can all impact an organization's data availability and uptime. When disruption strikes, failing to have the proper recovery solution can magnify the impact, causing significant harm to your business, customers, and reputation.
The stakes are high. For enterprise organizations, downtime can top $1 million per hour. Choosing the proper disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solution is critical to maintaining business continuity if an issue arises.
Reliability, scalability, and recovery time objectives (RTO) are all critical features of any DRaaS solution. In addition, finding a solution and provider that offers reduced management complexity can ensure internal IT teams are not weighed down by unnecessary troubleshooting or complex maintenance.
In this guide, we rank leading DRaaS providers to help you find the best fit—one that supports organizational resilience and maximizes recovery when data is impacted.
Key takeaways
- A disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solution replicates critical data and systems off-site to enable fast, reliable recovery after disruptions.
- Downtime and interrupted business continuity during ransomware attacks and hardware failures can seriously damage an organization’s bottom line.
- An ideal DRaaS solution is flexible and customizable, with powerful automation options to ease the workload of IT department teams.
- ConnectWise’s DRaaS offering augments automated backups with ransomware protection and 24/7 network operations center (NOC)-backed support—all from a centralized management pane.
Why choosing the right DRaaS provider matters
IT professionals know that business environments face constant risk. And sometimes, loss of data access can feel simply unavoidable. Even with that understanding, most businesses cannot tolerate downtime, knowing the impact an outage can have on revenue, profits, and customer satisfaction.
A robust disaster recovery as a service solution is more than a simple backup plan. With a proper DRaaS deployment, businesses and IT teams can ensure the recovery of environments in a timeframe and fashion that fits a specific business’s needs.
1. ConnectWise data protection solutions
ConnectWise offers a comprehensive data protection suite that can be combined to provide a holistic DRaaS solution, enabling MSPs and IT teams to protect client data where it lives. ConnectWise’s data protection solutions are designed to support a variety of SaaS, cloud, on-prem, and hybrid use cases, and can be highly customized to ensure recoverability in even the most demanding environments.
- ConnectWise x360Recover offers a hardware-free BCDR solution with direct-to-cloud backups and rapid recovery capabilities. Core features include the option of local cache for fast restore, bare metal restoration, and cloud-based virtualization for fast and flexible disaster recovery when local restoration is not an option
- ConnectWise Cloud Backup delivers continuous protection and fast recovery for Microsoft 365 data, shielding organizations from data loss due to ransomware or user errors with precise, item-level restores across the Microsoft platform stack.
- ConnectWise Co-managed Backup is supported by a 24/7 NOC to enhance disaster recovery preparedness by offloading backup management and recovery to ConnectWise specialists, minimizing strain on internal resources. This offering helps teams scale their impact by freeing up IT department or MSP team members to focus on other pressing business issues that require technical attention.
ConnectWise’s data protection offerings are designed for efficiency, flexibility, and customization to support a variety of use cases and applications. ConnectWise partners frequently cite the solution’s ability to reduce manual work through automation and its flexible recovery options as strong advantages. At the same time, features like full system replication and block-level encryption add significant value for maintaining compliance and safeguarding data against threats like ransomware.
While a comprehensive replacement of any BCDR or DRaaS solution can be challenging. ConnectWise’s onboarding support and the ConnectWise University training helps ensure proper deployment and rapid adoption of the comprehensive solution. With unlimited scalability and integrations with other solutions, including ConnectWise RMM and MDR, ConnectWise’s data protection solutions can provide a DRaaS solution with significant benefits to both the IT department and MSP communities.
2. Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery is Microsoft’s enterprise-grade disaster recovery management solution, natively integrated into Azure and Hyper-V environments. A powerful solution in native cloud workloads and primarily built around virtual machines (VMs), teams employ it to protect physical machines as well.
Its core features include continuous replication and application-consistent snapshots and seamless integration across Microsoft’s ecosystem. When properly configured, it delivers minimal recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs), making it a reasonable option for mission-critical workloads.
However, while deep flexibility is one of its greatest strengths, it also brings complexity. User reviews on G2 note that Azure Site Recovery requires significant IT expertise for anything beyond basic scenarios, particularly when managing manual failovers. This issue, combined with premium pricing, may make it less appealing for IT department teams or MSPs looking for an offering that balances protection and scalability.
3. VMware Live Recovery
VMware Live Recovery is built for virtualized environments, offering near-instant failover, workload mobility, and granular file recovery. Tightly integrated into the VMware ecosystem, it provides real-time behavioral analysis for ransomware detection and rapid restoration of critical applications.
VMware Live Recovery helps IT isolate recovery environments and air-gap recovery points to prevent tampering, making it a strong solution to deploy even during an ongoing attack. It’s a reasonably intuitive tool with real-time recovery previews that allow validation of restore points before full commitment.
Overall, VMware Live Recovery best suits current VMware users looking to adopt deep platform integration. It loses much of its appeal outside the VMware ecosystem, especially since other DRaaS providers offer scalable support and similar features at more affordable price tags.
4. Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud
Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud combines backup and disaster recovery into an all-in-one platform. Its unified, sleek interface makes it particularly appealing to IT teams seeking a proactive solution to protect their entire tech stacks. Its features include advanced threat detection, real-time behavioral analysis, and zero-knowledge encryption, ensuring data security across various workloads around the clock.
Although Acronis is among the more well-known recovery-as-a-service solutions, its learning curve is steep. Many of its more advanced features require extensive training and are hidden behind a pricing structure some users describe as confusing.
5. Arcserve ShadowProtect
Arcserve ShadowProtect is a disaster recovery as a service mainstay renowned for its image-based backup and rapid recovery capabilities. Instead of restoring individual files from physical or cloud backups, ShadowProtect creates an image of an entire disk partition, ideal for getting systems back online as they were.
With backups running every 15 minutes, the threat of data loss is minimal. It’s built with SMBs in mind, offering straightforward protection without enterprise-level bloat.
6. Unitrends Disaster Recovery as a Service
Unitrends Disaster Recovery as a Service delivers broad protection for physical and virtual environments. Its hybrid storage architecture combines on-premises and cloud backups, making it a good choice for large enterprise businesses. Backups run quietly in the background, and the platform supports push-button failover for rapid recovery during disasters. Additionally, Unitrends includes ransomware rollback capabilities, allowing organizations to restore systems to a pre-attack state.
That said, some G2 user reviews cite reliability inconsistencies. Thus, thorough testing and regular validation are a must to guarantee full recovery when needed. This functionality is integrated into other solutions at a significantly lower price point.
7. Datto SIRIS
Datto SIRIS is a unified backup DR solution with robust features like instant virtualization, allowing for rapid system recovery. It employs screenshot verification to ensure backup integrity. And Datto adds multiple layers of security with ransomware detection, forced two-factor authentication, and end-to-end data encryption. It supports local and cloud-based backups.
While the ability to overlap so many features is commendable, it leaves little space for integration with other tools. Teams that appreciate flexibility and customizability may find this platform cumbersome and somewhat limited.
8. Carbonite Recover
Carbonite Recover, from OpenText, zeroes in on Windows-based workloads with efficient cloud failover and continuous replication capabilities. It offers self-service and managed disaster recovery options, catering primarily to SMBs looking for simplicity and affordability. The platform's interface is intuitive enough for even lean teams without deep technical expertise.
However, it is a relatively basic product lacking many more advanced features of other platforms. If your organization is looking for simplicity for needs like file-level restoration, Carbonite Recover presents a viable option, provided that expectations align with its capabilities.
How to choose the right DRaaS provider for your team
When evaluating the proper SaaS backup and disaster recovery solution for your IT team, consider your organization’s size, cost of downtime, client needs and expectations, recovery time needs, and regulatory obligations. These considerations can help build the right offering to fit specific business needs, including deployment, that offers:
- Cloud-native solutions for flexibility and scale.
- Appliance-based options to deliver fast on-prem recovery.
- Hybrid models bring both to match business needs with risk.
Ideally, the perfect DRaaS is customizable and includes various deployment options to support your business as it scales. If use cases are limited by infrastructure or data size, you risk outgrowing your protection, which can result in unforeseen cost increases or complete DRaaS replacements. As your organization reviews potential partners, consider other BCDR/DRaaS features to ensure proper business alignment:
- Strong automation is necessary to reduce the manual load on IT teams.
- Technical protection of backup data through immutable storage and chain-free data recovery can protect it from attack or corruption.
- Your chosen solution’s RTOs and RPOs must align with how fast you need to bounce back and how much data loss is tolerable.
- A competent and always available support team makes a huge difference when everything fails.
MSPs supporting a high volume of SMB clients may have specific considerations when selecting a DRaaS provider, which we cover in-depth in our new BCDR Buyer’s Guide for MSPs.
Why choose ConnectWise?
BCDR solutions from ConnectWise are designed to provide DRaaS that helps organizations maintain data integrity, minimize downtime, and uphold their reputation in the face of disruptions.
These solutions enable IT teams and MSPs to efficiently oversee backups and disaster recovery processes by offering centralized management across various environments.
This streamlined approach supports scalability and reduces the complexity of managing multiple systems. Additionally, features like automated recovery-point checks and 24/7 NOC support contribute to a resilient infrastructure that can adapt to your evolving business needs without additional overhead or headcount.
Ready to see it live? Watch a demo of BCDR solutions from ConnectWise today.
