Ask most IT teams whether they're protected against a major outage or ransomware attack, and the answer will almost certainly be yes, because the backups are in place and the box marked 'disaster recovery plan' has been ticked.

But there's a difference between having a backup and recovering from a disaster, and that gap tends to reveal itself at the worst possible moment.

The backup problem nobody talks about

Backups were built for a different era. When the biggest threat was hardware failure or accidental deletion, copying files to tape or a secondary disk made sense, because the workflow was simply to preserve the data, restore from the copy, and carry on.

Modern threats operate differently. Ransomware operators do not just encrypt production systems; they target backup infrastructure first. By the time an attack becomes visible, malicious code may have lain dormant in the environment for weeks, so backup jobs from that window are already tainted.

IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that 76 percent of organizations needed more than 100 days to recover from a cyberattack, including those that believed their backups were intact.

For organizations with on-premises backup infrastructure, the arithmetic is brutal. Systems sit offline, staff cannot work, and customers feel the impact while IT teams scramble to find a clean recovery point that may or may not exist.

The gap between RTO goals and reality

Recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) are the core metrics of any disaster recovery plan. RTO defines how long systems can be offline before the business is materially harmed; RPO defines acceptable data loss. Both look reasonable on paper, yet practice tends to expose them as aspirational more often than IT teams care to admit.

Legacy backup tools were designed to protect data, not to deliver fast recovery at scale. Restoring a full server takes hours or days, especially when the target hardware differs from what was lost. Testing rarely happens rigorously, which leaves edge cases unexplored, so when disaster strikes the recovery plan turns out to have been theoretical.

Among businesses with 20 to 100 employees, 57 percent report downtime costs exceeding $100,000 per hour. For an SMB earning $10 million in annual revenue, a single day offline can cost $55,000 in direct losses. One in five SMBs would go out of business if the attack cost them as little as $10,000 in damages.

The market is responding. The global Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) sector was valued at $18.89 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $83.15 billion by 2034, a trajectory that reflects how many organizations are moving beyond backup-only thinking.

What DRaaS changes

Disaster Recovery as a Service is a different proposition. Rather than copying data and hoping restoration goes smoothly, DRaaS maintains a live, continuously updated replica of the protected environment and provides the cloud infrastructure to run it within minutes of a failure.

In a ransomware scenario, the architecture matters. Immutable, offsite cloud storage keeps backup data beyond the reach of an attacker who has compromised the local environment, while automated failover removes the dependency on a manual process that has rarely been rehearsed. Because the replica runs in the cloud, recovery time is counted in minutes rather than days.

Cove Data Protection's DRaaS is built on this model. The architecture is cloud-native by design rather than an appliance-based product with a cloud layer retrofitted. Backup data lives in N-able's private cloud , physically separated from customer infrastructure, with immutability applied by default. Tested failover to the cloud comes as a core feature rather than a premium add-on.

Cove is built for the modern era and requires minimal babysitting, with multi-tenant management, automated testing, and a single interface across the entire environment. That contrasts with enterprise platforms that demand heavy customization before they work.

Testing as a feature, not an afterthought

How DRaaS providers approach recovery testing is one of the sharpest differentiators in the market. Most backup products leave it as a manual exercise that IT teams plan but rarely complete, because spinning up a recovery environment is disruptive.

Cove automates recovery verification, with tests that run against backed-up workloads and confirm restoration succeeded. Administrators see evidence that the systems they protect would come back online as expected. The benefit extends beyond compliance to the difference between a plan that works and one that merely exists.

For businesses and MSPs that handle dozens or hundreds of clients or employees, tested and verified recoverability at scale has become central to the value proposition and a genuine differentiator in a market where backup is now a commodity.

Cove Data Protection, part of the N-able portfolio, provides cloud-native backup and disaster recovery as a service for organizations. Learn more at n-able.com/products/cove-data-protection.

Contributed by N-able.