DRaaS: Cloud Failover & Disaster Recovery Planning for Northern Ontario

Backup gives you a copy of your data. DRaaS goes further: it gives you a way to actually run your systems from the cloud if your primary hardware or site is unavailable. Instead of restoring data to new hardware over hours or days, a failed-over server can be brought online in the cloud in a fraction of that time, buying you room to fix or replace what failed.

The scenarios we plan for most often are hardware failure (a server dies and there's no quick replacement), site outages (power, fire, flood, or physical damage to the office), and ransomware events severe enough that rebuilding in place isn't realistic. DRaaS gives you a path to bring critical systems back online somewhere else while the primary environment is repaired.

No, and any provider who tells you that isn't being straight with you. What we can do is design a recovery target, agree on it with you in plain numbers, build the architecture to hit it, and test it regularly so you have a realistic, evidence-based picture of how long recovery actually takes.

RTO (recovery time objective) is how long your business can tolerate being down. RPO (recovery point objective) is how much data loss, measured in time, you can tolerate. We start with a conversation about what each system is worth to your business if it's unavailable, then design backup frequency and failover architecture to meet those numbers rather than guessing.

We schedule test failovers, meaning we bring a recovered system up in an isolated cloud environment and verify it actually boots, connects, and functions, without touching production. A DR plan that has never been tested is a theory. We treat testing as part of the service, not an optional extra.

It depends on the system and the RTO it was designed against. Simple servers can often be brought online in the cloud within an hour or two of a decision to fail over. More complex, multi-server environments take longer to bring up in the right order. We document expected timelines per system so there are no surprises during an actual incident.

We build DRaaS on Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, which combines backup, disaster recovery, and cybersecurity in one platform. That means the same backup data that protects against day-to-day data loss can also be spun up as a running recovery environment, instead of maintaining two disconnected systems.

No. Cloud-based failover has made DR realistic for small and mid-sized businesses that could never have justified a second physical data centre. We scope DRaaS to the systems that would actually hurt the business if they went down, which for most SMBs is a handful of servers, not the entire environment.