For small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs), even a disruption such as a power outage that lasts a few hours can mean significant losses—especially for those companies that rely heavily on e-commerce and other online transactions. For longer-lasting interruptions such as those that result from a hurricane, tornado or earthquake, the losses can be even greater.

One possible solution for mitigating the risks of downtime because of an unexpected event is disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). DRaaS is a type of cloud-based offering that protects systems, applications and data from natural or human disasters, or any kind of service disruption at a given location. It provides this protection by enabling a full recovery in the cloud.

DRaaS protects data and provides standby computing capacity on demand to enable a more rapid recovery of applications following an event. Capacity is delivered in the cloud, so companies only pay for the recovery resources when they use them.