Updated: July 08, 2026
Disaster recovery is the insurance policy every enterprise says it has, and few have ever filed a claim on, until the day they must, and discover the policy was never quite real. The second site was half-configured. The failover had not been tested in two years. The runbook lived in the head of someone who left.
Disaster Recovery as a Service exists to close that gap by making recovery a managed, tested capability rather than a document in a drawer. This guide explains what DRaaS is, when to buy it rather than build it, how to size it to your business, and what to demand of a provider, with the India-specific factors that the global guides leave out.
DRaaS is disaster recovery delivered as a managed service: a provider maintains a ready-to-use secondary environment that your systems can fail over to when your primary site is hit by an outage, hardware failure, site loss or a cyber-attack. Instead of building, staffing and testing your own second data center, you replicate your workloads to the provider's environment and invoke it when needed. It is distinct from Backup as a Service, which protects your data; DRaaS protects your ability to keep running, by giving you somewhere to run when your primary environment cannot.
This is the central decision, and it is a build-versus-buy question. Self-managed DR means owning and operating your own secondary site: maximum control, but the full cost and burden of building, maintaining, staffing and testing it fall on you. DRaaS shifts most of that burden to a provider, in exchange for a recurring fee and a dependency on them. The table sets out the trade-off.
| Factor | Self-Managed DR | DRaaS |
|---|---|---|
| Up-front cost | High; you build the second site | Low; you subscribe |
| Ongoing burden | You maintain, staff and test it | The provider runs and tests it |
| Control | Complete | Shared with the provider |
| Expertise needed | Significant in-house DR skills | Less; the provider supplies it |
| Best for | Large estates with DR skills and reasons to own | Enterprises wanting tested recovery without running a second site |
Most enterprises that lack a fully-staffed, regularly-tested second site are better served by DRaaS, because a managed, tested service beats an owned-but-neglected one. The organisations that should self-manage are those with the scale, skills and specific reasons to keep DR entirely in-house.
By tiering your systems, because not everything needs the same disaster recovery, and treating it all the same is how DR becomes unaffordable. Rank your systems by how fast they must return (recovery-time objective) and how much data you can afford to lose (recovery-point objective). A handful of critical systems may need near-immediate failover with minimal data loss; important systems can tolerate a few hours; the rest can wait a day. That tiering drives both the design and the cost, because the fastest recovery is the most expensive, and you apply it only where the business genuinely needs it.
| Tier | Recovery Target | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Critical | Failover in minutes to an hour; minimal data loss | Core transaction systems, customer-facing services |
| Important | Recovery within hours | Internal applications, reporting |
| Standard | Recovery within a day or more | Archives, non-urgent systems |
Treat provider selection as a checklist, and do not accept vague answers. Ask each candidate: What recovery-time and recovery-point objectives do you guarantee, and are they contractual? How often is failover tested, and will you test with us, not just promise it works? Where is the DR site located, and can you keep our data in India? What security and immutability protect the replicated environment against a cyber-attack that follows us into DR? How does failback work once our primary site is restored? What exactly is covered, and what remains our responsibility? And what support do you provide during an actual invocation, in our time zone? A provider who answers these crisply, and will prove them in a test, is offering recovery; one who deflects is offering a brochure.
Because for Indian enterprises, where the DR site sits is both a performance and a compliance question. Replicating regulated data to a secondary site means that site is now holding that data, so residency obligations under the DPDP framework and sector rules such as RBI's payment-data localisation apply to your DR environment just as they do to production.
A DR site outside India can create a compliance exposure precisely at the moment you most need the recovery to be clean and defensible. Latency matters too: a DR site too far away can slow replication and recovery. So the in-India DR site is not a preference but, for regulated workloads, often a requirement, and it is a question to settle explicitly with any provider.
The honest answer is that it depends on what you protect and how fast you need it back, which is why this guide does not quote a figure. DRaaS is typically priced by the workloads or capacity protected and the recovery tier, so the cost follows directly from your tiering: protecting everything at the fastest tier is expensive, while tiering sensibly keeps it proportionate. Other variables include data volumes, retention, testing frequency, and the support level. Rather than chase a per-unit price, build the budget from your tiers: decide what must be in the critical tier, what can sit lower, and price the service against that. When you request quotes, specify the workloads, the RTO and RPO per tier, the testing cadence, the DR site location, and the support expectations, so the quotes are comparable and none is hiding an exclusion.
Tier first, then test. Over-buying comes from protecting everything at the highest tier; under-buying comes from discovering, during a real disaster, that a system you assumed was covered was not, or that the recovery time is far slower than you believed. Both are avoided by tiering deliberately and, crucially, by insisting on a real failover test before and after you sign, because an untested DR plan is a hypothesis whatever the contract says. The right provider welcomes the test; it is how they prove the service is recovery, not paperwork.
The value of disaster recovery is realised on exactly one day, and on that day a tested, managed capability is worth incomparably more than an owned site nobody maintained. Designing the tiers, choosing between DRaaS and self-managed, selecting a provider that keeps your data in India and proves its recovery times, and testing it until it is routine, is where an experienced partner turns DR from a hope into a capability.
Proactive Data Systems designs and delivers disaster recovery and DRaaS for Indian enterprises, with in-India recovery options and tested failover, across Veeam, Veritas, Rubrik, ExaGrid and Dell EMC. We are a Cisco Preferred Cloud and AI Partner, Dell Platinum Partner and NetApp Preferred Partner, with 35 years in enterprise IT, more than 1,500 organisations served, and a 24/7 service desk in India. To build a DR plan you can actually invoke, you can ask Proactive for a disaster recovery assessment.
Disclaimer: This guide is general guidance, not a quote, and not legal or compliance advice. DRaaS pricing varies by workloads, recovery tiers, data volumes, testing and support, and changes over time. Residency obligations depend on your data and sector. Obtain formal quotes that specify scope, and confirm compliance requirements with qualified counsel, before committing.
Muhammad Shariq General Manager, Data Center, Proactive Data Systems
We'll get back to you shortly.
