What Does Disaster Recovery as a Service Cost?

Most DRaaS contracts run on a subscription or consumption model instead of a flat license fee. The total is built from several moving parts stacked on top of each other: 

• Platform fees
• Replica storage
• Recovery-point storage
• Replication infrastructure
• Standby capacity
• Network usage
• Testing allowance
• Whatever managed services are included

Public cloud pricing illustrates how fast this adds up. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery charges $0.028 per server per hour, about $20.44 per server per month. However, its own 100-server example puts the total monthly bill at $6,389.03, close to $63.89 per server, meaning the platform fee covers only about a third of what you pay. 

Azure follows a similar pattern: $25 per protected instance per month, with the first 31 days free on newly protected workloads.

The number and type of systems you protect set the baseline for everything else.

Most platforms bill per server, per VM, or per instance. Consequently, protecting 50 servers costs more than protecting 10 before storage or management even enters the picture. 

Still, workload type matters just as much as workload count. A simple web server is far cheaper to recover than a clustered database, an ERP platform, or any system tangled up with dependencies that need to come back online in a specific order.

When sizing out workloads, account for server and VM count, vCPU/RAM/disk needs, operating systems and licensing, databases, legacy systems, recovery sequencing, and whether you’re running on-prem, hybrid, or across multiple clouds. 

Assuming every system deserves the same protection is a common mistake. Putting a low-priority file server in the same expensive tier as a core transaction database just inflates the bill without buying any real protection.

Recovery time and recovery point objectives are where DRaaS pricing swings the most.

A shorter RTO means systems come back online faster. A tighter RPO means you can’t afford to lose much data, which pushes you toward more frequent, sometimes continuous, replication. Both drive up the total disaster recovery as a service cost, since faster recovery requires infrastructure that’s already running, not infrastructure you spin up after the fact.

Warm standby costs more than a pilot light because a scaled-down environment runs around the clock. Active-active costs more still; a full secondary environment, continuously available and ready for production traffic. Reserved or standby capacity adds to the bill, too, since you’re paying to guarantee those resources are there when disaster hits, not hoping they’re available on demand.

Storage is one of the largest and most overlooked line items in a DRaaS quote. Providers price it a few different ways, like total protected capacity, replica capacity, or actual consumed storage, and costs stack across replica disks, snapshots, incremental recovery points, immutable copies, and long-term retention. In AWS’s 100-server example, staging volumes and snapshots alone came to $3,271.50 a month, more than the core platform license itself.

Two other factors shape this number. The first is data-change rate: AWS’s example assumes a 3.3% daily change rate, and workloads that change more data every day generate more replication traffic and larger snapshots. 

The second is retention. That same example uses seven days of snapshot retention, and stretching that to 30 or 90 days raises storage costs, especially for high-change workloads. Network usage also matters. Azure charges egress fees when replicated data leaves a region, even after compressing it.

Testing is what proves your RTO and RPO targets hold up, and it isn’t free. Spinning up recovery environments for a drill creates temporary infrastructure charges, even without a real disaster. AWS estimates an eight-hour test across 100 servers at around $122.94 in infrastructure costs alone. A fully managed test runs higher once engineering time, validation, and reporting are added in.

It’s worth the money. Veeam’s research found that 90% of organizations feel confident they could recover from a cyber incident. However, only 28% of ransomware victims actually recovered all of their data; the average recovery landed at 72%. That gap between confidence and outcome is exactly what testing closes.

How much of the work your provider handles changes the price almost as much as the technology underneath it.

Self-service DRaaS supplies the software and infrastructure, but configuration, testing, monitoring, and failover execution fall on you. It’s cheaper upfront if your team has the time and expertise to run it correctly under pressure. 

Managed DRaaS costs more because it includes more: 

• Initial discovery and assessment
• Documented runbooks
• Continuous monitoring
• Scheduled test execution
• 24/7 incident response
• Hands-on help with failover and failback

Some costs sit outside the monthly bill entirely. Onboarding and professional services, such as assessment, data seeding, and mapping, are often one-time charges, as are security and compliance controls like encryption, immutable recovery points, and SOX or PCI support. Those belong in the conversation from the start.

Controlling DRaaS spend doesn’t mean cutting corners. It means matching protection to actual need.

1. Tier workloads by business impact, and reserve near-zero recovery for the systems that genuinely require it rather than applying that level everywhere. 
2. Clear out obsolete or reproducible data before calculating what needs protecting. There is no reason to pay to replicate something you don’t need back. 
3. Right-size recovery servers, too; not every application needs full production capacity the moment it launches, and some can scale up once core services are running again.
4. Review retention by workload instead of leaning on one blanket 30- or 90-day rule across the board. Strive to match each application to the strategy it needs.

How much does DRaaS cost per server per month? 

Using AWS’s published example as a guide, the base platform charge runs about $20.44 per server per month. Once storage, snapshots, and replication compute get factored in, the realistic total climbs closer to $63.89 per server per month, nearly three times the platform fee alone.

Is DRaaS cheaper than building disaster recovery in-house? 

It depends on what downtime costs you. The Uptime Institute found that 54% of serious outages cost organizations more than $100,000, and one in five exceeded $1 million. IBM puts the average data breach at $4.4 million in 2025. Against those numbers, DRaaS subscription costs tend to look modest.

What pricing questions should I ask a DRaaS provider? 

Ask whether pricing runs per VM, server, or protected terabyte. Confirm whether replica and snapshot storage are included, how many managed tests you get each year, whether failover and failback engineering are covered, whether egress charges get passed through, and whether onboarding is billed separately.

At OTAVA, we scope DRaaS by starting with your critical workloads. We assess what genuinely needs near-zero recovery versus what can tolerate a slower RTO, then match each workload to the right tier across Veeam, Zerto, or VMware environments, whichever fits your stack. From there, we price storage, testing, and management transparently, so nothing gets discovered after the contract is signed. Talk to our DR engineers, and we’ll turn these factors into a quote that reflects what your business needs to protect.