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Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between disaster recovery and business continuity?
Disaster recovery (DR) focuses on restoring IT systems and data after a disruption — it is technology-centric. Business continuity planning (BCP) is broader, covering how the entire organization continues operating during and after a disruption, including people, processes, facilities, and communications — not just IT. DR is a component of BCP. Organizations need both: a DR plan to restore systems, and a BCP to keep the business running while systems are being restored.
What is DRaaS and when should you use it?
Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) replicates your workloads to a cloud provider's infrastructure and provides managed failover capabilities. DRaaS is appropriate when: you need to eliminate DR infrastructure capital costs, your RTO is 1–4 hours (not sub-minute), your workloads are virtualized, and you lack internal DR expertise. DRaaS is not appropriate for sub-second RTO requirements, highly regulated workloads with data sovereignty restrictions, or workloads that cannot tolerate cloud performance variability.
How often should you test your DR plan?
DR plans should be tested at minimum annually, with most enterprises conducting quarterly tests. Testing should progress from tabletop exercises (review the plan without executing it) to simulation tests (test components without full failover) to full failover tests (actually fail over to the DR environment). Many organizations avoid full failover tests due to risk, but untested DR plans fail 40–60% of the time in actual disasters.
Key Terms
An assessment that identifies critical business functions, quantifies the impact of disruptions, and establishes RTO and RPO requirements for each function.
A cloud-based service that replicates and hosts physical or virtual servers to provide failover in the event of a disaster.
The automatic or manual switching of operations to a redundant or standby system when the primary system fails.
A DR architecture where two or more sites simultaneously handle production traffic, providing instant failover with no data loss.
Buyer\'s Guide
Questions to ask when evaluating disaster recovery solutions.
Why it matters: Many DRaaS providers advertise low RTOs but do not guarantee them in SLAs. The contractual RTO — with financial penalties for breach — is the only meaningful metric.
Red flag: Providers who cannot provide RTO guarantees in writing with financial remedies.
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