Disaster Recovery as a Service, or DRaaS, is a subscription model where a provider supplies recovery infrastructure, replication, and failover capabilities. It shifts disaster recovery from capital-heavy internal build-outs to recurring operating expense, while still requiring governance, testing, and evidence that the service can meet recovery targets.
Expanded Definition
Disaster Recovery as a Service, or DRaaS, is a delivery model for restoring systems, data, and supporting services after an outage or destructive event by using a third-party platform rather than a fully self-owned recovery site. In practice, DRaaS usually combines replicated workloads, orchestration, failover runbooks, and a tested recovery environment so organisations can meet recovery time objective and recovery point objective expectations without maintaining a secondary datacentre. The concept sits within broader resilience planning and overlaps with business continuity, but it is not the same thing: business continuity covers how the organisation keeps operating, while DRaaS focuses on restoring technology services after disruption. As a governance matter, DRaaS should be measured against recovery commitments, dependency mapping, and test evidence, not just service availability claims. NIST frames resilience and recovery expectations in NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, which is useful when defining recovery outcomes and ownership. The most common misapplication is treating DRaaS as an automatic guarantee of recovery, which occurs when organisations assume the provider’s platform replaces application-specific testing and dependency validation.
Examples and Use Cases
Implementing DRaaS rigorously often introduces testing overhead and dependency coordination, requiring organisations to weigh faster recovery against the operational effort of keeping failover plans current.
- A financial services firm replicates core virtual machines to a DRaaS environment so it can fail over trading support systems after a regional cloud outage.
- A healthcare organisation uses DRaaS for electronic records applications, but still validates restore order, identity dependencies, and network segmentation before each test.
- A SaaS provider adopts DRaaS to avoid building a second site, then documents recovery objectives, routing changes, and application ownership in its continuity plan.
- An ecommerce business runs quarterly failover exercises to prove that payment, catalogue, and authentication services can come back in the right sequence.
- An enterprise with hybrid infrastructure uses DRaaS for a subset of critical workloads while keeping some legacy systems on internal recovery procedures because they do not replicate cleanly.
For identity-heavy environments, recovery planning must include directory services, privileged access paths, and secrets needed to re-establish trust after a disaster. That is especially important when authentication, access gateways, and automation tooling are themselves part of the recovery chain.
Why It Matters for Security Teams
DRaaS matters because recovery capability is a security control, not only an IT continuity feature. If it is poorly governed, organisations may discover that replicated systems come back without the right access policies, logs, certificates, or application dependencies, creating a second incident during recovery. Security teams need visibility into how the provider protects replicated data, how failover environments are isolated, and how restoration is authenticated and audited. This is where identity and NHI governance become relevant: service account, API keys, automation identities, and recovery tooling often have privileged access during failover, so their credentials must be controlled with the same rigor as production access. Guidance in NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 helps teams tie recovery planning to governance, protective controls, and recovery testing. Organisations also need to verify that backup and replication processes do not expand the attack surface or create unnoticed single points of failure. Organisations typically encounter the true cost of DRaaS only after a major outage or ransomware event, at which point the service’s real recovery readiness becomes operationally unavoidable to address.
Standards & Framework Alignment
This section maps relevant standards and security frameworks to the operational risks and controls described in this guidance.
NIST CSF 2.0 provides the primary governance reference for this term.
| Framework | Control / Reference | Relevance |
|---|---|---|
| NIST CSF 2.0 | RC.RP-1 | CSF recovery planning and implementation directly relate to DRaaS use. |
Define, test, and maintain recovery plans so DRaaS supports verified restoration outcomes.
Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group
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Reviewed and updated by the NHIMG editorial team on July 11, 2026.
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