Glossary Term

DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service)

A cloud-hosted recovery environment, owned and operated by a provider, that an organization can fail over to during a disaster instead of maintaining its own secondary site.

Definition

DRaaS replaces a self-managed secondary site with a cloud-hosted recovery environment, often built on infrastructure like IBM Power Virtual Server, that a provider keeps ready and bills for on a subscription basis. Some approaches keep a minimally resourced cloud instance inactive until it is actually needed for failover, which lowers ongoing cost compared to running a fully provisioned standby system year-round.

For IBM i buyers, DRaaS is usually evaluated alongside traditional HA and backup options rather than as a complete replacement for them, since recovery point and recovery time objectives still drive which combination of tools makes sense.

Example

An organization without a second physical data center may use DRaaS to get site-level recovery capability without building or leasing one.