DRaaS vs. Backup: Why Backup Alone Won't Recover Your Business

“We already do backups” is one of the most common reactions when disaster recovery comes up — and it’s also one of the most dangerous assumptions you can make. Backup and DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) solve different problems, and knowing the difference matters when your production environment actually goes down.

Backup answers “can we get the data back?”

A backup is a copy of data, taken on a schedule, that can be restored if something is lost or corrupted. Backup is essential — but on its own, it only answers one question: can we recover the data? It doesn’t answer how long the business is offline while that data gets restored, rebuilt, and made usable again.

DRaaS answers “how fast can the business run again?”

DRaaS replicates entire systems — not just data, but the infrastructure needed to run it — so your environment can fail over and keep operating with minimal disruption. The two numbers that actually describe a DR plan, as defined in NIST’s contingency planning guidance, are:

• RPO (Recovery Point Objective) — how much data you could lose, measured in time. If your RPO is 15 minutes, you lose at most 15 minutes of data in a disaster.
• RTO (Recovery Time Objective) — how long it takes to get the business running again after a disaster is declared.

A nightly backup might have an RPO of 24 hours and an RTO measured in days, once you account for sourcing replacement infrastructure, reinstalling systems, and restoring data onto them. For a business running production workloads, that gap is often the difference between a bad day and a business-ending event.

What good DRaaS numbers look like

Foortress’s managed disaster recovery service is built around a 15-minute RPO, a 2-hour in-region RTO, and a 4-hour cross-region RTO for major disasters — meaning you’re back online in hours, not days, with at most 15 minutes of data at risk.

Questions to ask before you assume backup is enough

1. If production went down right now, what’s our actual RPO and RTO — not our backup schedule, but our full recovery time?
2. Are we replicating infrastructure, or just copying files?
3. Is failover tested, or only assumed to work?
4. What compliance requirements (HIPAA, SOC 2, cyber insurance) actually require documented RPO/RTO commitments, not just “we have backups”?

Backup is a necessary part of a resilience strategy. It’s just not the whole strategy.

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