For too many organizations, disaster recovery has always been a last resort. They have historically viewed it as a dusty contingency plan that exists mostly to satisfy auditors, but usually doesn’t get tested until it's too late. N-able thinks that model is broken – and given the growing rate, complexity, and impact of cyber threats, it’s not wrong.
The cybersecurity and IT management firm announced an expansion of its Cove Data Protection platform with a new co-managed Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offering. It’s designed to let organizations fail over to a clean, vendor-managed cloud environment rapidly after a cyber attack or site failure, without having to build or maintain their own recovery infrastructure.
Effectively, it mitigates the risk of untested or unmaintained BCDR tools and infrastructure, and it fits squarely within the scope of current resilience conversation. Ransomware and other cyber attacks increasingly target not just production systems, but backup and recovery environments as well as bad actors look to not only disrupt operations but also eliminate an organization's escape hatch. When a backup is compromised alongside everything else, traditional models can leave businesses without a good path to operational recovery.
"Downtime and data loss are no longer acceptable risks, especially as cyber attacks continue to target production and backup environments," said Chris Groot, General Manager of Cove Data Protection at N-able. "With Cove DRaaS, we're providing MSPs and IT teams with a secure, cloud-hosted recovery environment that enables rapid failover when it matters most – without the cost, complexity, or risk of building and managing DR infrastructure themselves."
What distinguishes N-able’s offering from conventional backup-and-restore approaches is its pre-staged architecture. Rather than waiting for an incident to occur and then attempting to rebuild systems from scratch, Cove DRaaS maintains mirrored production workloads in N-able's cloud environment, ready to activate at a moment's notice. Organizations can fail over to those clean environments while quarantining and remediating affected systems, keeping operations running during what would otherwise be a costly outage.
Early adopters say the difference is noticeable.
"PCS had been using a mix of third-party tools for disaster recovery, solutions that worked, but were often complex and time consuming to set up and manage," said Scott Hawkey, Technical Director at PCS. "After trialing Cove DRaaS, the difference was immediately clear. The process is far more streamlined and intuitive, freeing up our team to spend more time supporting customers rather than managing infrastructure."
There’s another benefit to the co-managed model in that it addresses a resource problem that can easily undermine disaster recovery programs at organizations because they simply don't have the in-house expertise or budget to build and maintain a dedicated DR environment. Frankly, unpredictable cloud costs, limited staff, and the operational burden mean that even organizations with formal DR plans often find their plans don't hold up under real-world conditions.
By shifting that burden to a vendor-managed service with predictable pricing, N-able is making a case that enterprise-grade resilience shouldn't require enterprise-scale IT departments. At the same time, it is highlighting a flawed misconception that backup is not the same as recovery, and recovery is not the same as resilience. Having data stored somewhere is only valuable if you can get back to operational status quickly enough to matter.
As cyber attacks grow more sophisticated and downtime costs continue to climb, the gap between those three concepts is where real business risk lives. N-able’s co-managed DRaaS solution is meant to help MSPs cover that gap for their customers.
Edited by
Erik Linask
