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In today’s threat-heavy environment, cloud-based data protection has become a frontline defense. Cyberattacks, especially ransomware, have made cloud-based data protection more urgent than ever. When systems go down or data gets encrypted, the speed and reliability of your recovery plan determine whether your business rebounds or grinds to a halt.
According to IBM, the average breach now costs $4.44 million globally. Meanwhile, Verizon’s 2025 DBIR shows ransomware played a role in 44% of all breaches. In this kind of landscape, how and when you back up your data becomes a strategic decision. The core question many IT teams face is: Should we back up on a schedule or implement a Disaster Recovery solution?
This blog breaks down the difference between the two, maps them to real-world risks, and helps you decide what fits best for your workloads.
The best way to start this conversation is by understanding what we’re really comparing. DRaaS and scheduled backups reflect fundamentally different strategies for cloud-based data protection.
DRaaS captures every change to your data in near real-time. That means if you edit a document, log a transaction, or update a record, that change is immediately protected. This creates incredibly low Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs), sometimes down to just a few seconds.
DRaaS not only protects data in near real-time, but it also offers an orchestrated recovery environment, automated failover, and regular testing to ensure that applications and services can be restored quickly and predictably.
DRaaS shines in environments where every second of data matters: financial systems, healthcare records, live databases, or SaaS platforms processing constant updates. If something goes wrong, you can roll back to a precise moment just before the event.
Scheduled backups, on the other hand, follow a set cadence. That might be every 15 minutes, hourly, or daily. This method is more resource-efficient and often easier to scale, especially when dealing with non-critical systems.
With scheduled backups, your RPO is only as good as your last successful job. Therefore, if you’re backing up every hour, you could lose up to 59 minutes of data in a worst-case scenario.
Both methods have a place. It just depends on what you’re protecting and how much risk your business can tolerate.
Why does this decision even matter so much? Because the risk profile has changed dramatically. Ransomware is now mainstream. According to Verizon’s 2025 report, 75% of all system intrusion breaches involved ransomware.
Worse, most organizations still struggle to recover. Veeam’s 2025 research found that even among companies that had backups, many failed to recover more than half their data. Some paid the ransom anyway, despite having a backup strategy.
Two recent examples show just how damaging this can be. In early 2024, Change Healthcare was hit by a major ransomware attack that froze claims processing across the country. Recovery took weeks. Around the same time, Ascension saw clinical operations disrupted in hospitals across multiple states, with millions of patient records at risk.
The lesson? Backups are only useful if they’re hardened, tested, and built for the threat landscape we’re in now, not the one we were in five years ago.
That’s why our cloud-based data protection approach at OTAVA emphasizes immutability, off-network storage, and routine recovery testing.
Many of these requirements map directly to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0, which places renewed emphasis on governance, resilience, and recoverability. Under NIST CSF 2.0, organizations are expected not just to back up data, but to demonstrate that systems and services can be restored within defined risk tolerances following a cyber incident. Whether you’re in healthcare, finance, or a public company, your backup strategy must meet specific standards.
Let’s start with healthcare. Under the HIPAA Security Rule, all covered entities must have a data backup plan in place that ensures exact retrievable copies of electronic protected health information (ePHI). This is spelled out in 45 CFR 164.308(a)(7).
Next, there’s NIST SP 800-53, which is widely used across federal and commercial sectors. Controls CP-9 and CP-10 require that backups occur often enough to meet RPO/RTO goals, and that recovery processes are regularly tested.
ISO/IEC 27001:2022, a global information security standard, includes Annex A 8.13, which focuses on backup creation, protection, and regular testing.
In the financial space, PCI DSS v4.0 expects businesses to demonstrate recoverability of systems storing cardholder data, while the FTC Safeguards Rule requires that financial institutions can respond effectively to incidents, which includes restoring lost or corrupted data.
If you’re a public company, the SEC’s 2024 cyber disclosure rules now put recovery ability under scrutiny. If a cyber event materially impacts operations, you’ll need to prove that your systems, including backup, were designed for fast restoration.
At OTAVA, we help clients navigate all these frameworks. Our backup solutions are tailored not just for performance, but for compliance, complete with documented retention policies, access controls, and testing support for audit readiness.
Choosing between DRaaS and scheduled backups is a technical decision as well as a risk calculation.
If your systems run 24/7 or process high-frequency transactions, DRaaS is often the right fit. Applications like EMRs, payment platforms, or CRM integrations benefit from the low RPO CDP delivers.
However, DRaaS isn’t plug-and-play. To do it right, you need ransomware scanning, active replication monitoring, and a ready-to-use secure failover environment. That’s why we deliver our Managed DRaaS with Zerto to customers who need true continuous replication, coupled with orchestration and monitoring.
For less sensitive data, like file servers, endpoint devices, or internal testing environments, scheduled backups are more than enough. They’re easier to manage, easier to budget for, and still meet many compliance requirements.
We support this model through our Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Veeam Cloud Connect offerings. Clients get policy-driven scheduling, encrypted storage, and optional immutability without the complexity of real-time replication.
In truth, most businesses land somewhere in the middle, having backups for everything and then DRaaS for Tier-1 workloads. What matters most is having the right controls in place: immutable repositories, offline copies, frequent recovery drills, and alerting.
We’ve built our cloud backup and disaster recovery suite to support layered protection that adapts to your environment, not the other way around.
The best defense against ransomware is preparation.
According to CISA’s 2025 StopRansomware guidance, organizations should maintain immutable backups, isolate them from production networks, and test recovery often.
If your business cannot tolerate more than a few minutes of data loss or hours of downtime, scheduled backups alone are not enough.
At OTAVA, we emphasize multiple layers in our cloud-based data protection architecture:
All of this is wrapped into our S.E.C.U.R.E.™ framework, which helps clients align with cyber insurance requirements, compliance audits, and board-level risk tolerances. Undo ensures you can roll back to clean, trusted data using immutable backups, while Recover activates tested disaster recovery plans and managed DRaaS to restore applications and services within defined RTOs.
It’s easy to think of backups as a sunk cost, but they’re not. When an outage hits, recovery speed becomes your most valuable asset.
In regulated industries, downtime can cost upward of $300K per hour. That doesn’t include brand damage or regulatory penalties. DRaaS helps shrink downtime and avoid SLA breaches. Scheduled backups, meanwhile, keep costs down and workloads covered at scale.
The real value lies in matching the method to the workload. That’s where our experience comes in. We help customers optimize for both cost and consequence, with RPOs and RTOs that reflect what the business needs.
Cloud-based data protection is no longer about backup frequency alone. It’s about precision. Knowing what matters most, how quickly you need it back, and what tools will get you there.
At OTAVA, we design full-spectrum protection strategies. From managed backup and BaaS to DRaaS and cloud compliance management, we help businesses across healthcare, finance, SaaS, and beyond meet today’s recovery demands with confidence.
We monitor your backup health, automate retention enforcement, and ensure your plans are tested, documented, and ready before anything goes wrong.
Reach out to our team to schedule a consultation. Let’s build something recoverable.
