Disaster recovery has evolved from a paper-based plan into an operational and measurable service thanks to Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). This model allows organizations to define specific RTOs (Recovery Time Objectives) and RPOs (Recovery Point Objectives), replicate critical workloads in real time, and regularly validate their continuity plans through non-disruptive testing.
DRaaS has become essential for sectors with high availability and regulatory demands, enabling immediate failover—automatic switching to backup systems—without oversizing infrastructure. This article explores its applications and benefits across different industries.
Financial sector: continuity and regulatory compliance
Financial institutions manage critical infrastructures that include core banking systems, real-time payment platforms, ATMs, and digital channels. These environments are subject to frameworks such as the EBA Guidelines on ICT and Security Risk Management, Basel III, or the European Central Bank directives, which require demonstrable recovery capacity with auditable RTOs and RPOs.
For this reason, DRaaS is necessary for any company in the financial sector, enabling:
- Cyberattack scenarios that activate isolated environments to keep essential services running while containing the incident.
- Synchronous replication in low-latency environments for instant payment systems, and asynchronous replicationfor back-office applications with higher tolerance to data loss.
- Regular failover testing that generates automatic reports valid for audit and regulatory supervision.
- Full traceability of the replication and restoration cycle, a key requirement to comply with European and national regulations.
- Tiered recovery times: minutes for settlement or stock exchange systems, longer windows for internal services.
The case of the European Central Bank (ECB)
In October 2020, the European Central Bank suffered an outage on its TARGET2 payments platform, which interrupted interbank settlement across the eurozone for nearly ten hours.
The system had contingency mechanisms and synchronized backup sites, but the incident exposed limitations in failover automation and backup activation. An independent review also highlighted deficiencies in crisis management and communication protocols, forcing the ECB to strengthen recovery testing and revise operational continuity procedures.
This case demonstrates that simply having a disaster recovery plan is not enough: the effectiveness of failover must be validated regularly, and backup systems must be ready to activate quickly in any scenario.
Energy sector: resilience in critical infrastructures
The energy sector operates with industrial control systems (ICS/SCADA) that require continuous operation and maximum availability. Disruption in these environments impacts not only electricity supply but also grid stability and compliance with standards such as ISO 22301 or EU directives on critical infrastructure.
The application of DRaaS in this sector enables:
- Optimized replication traffic through compression and deduplication, preventing saturation of communication lines in remote locations.
- Scheduled recovery testing without disruption, validating continuity plans against both physical and cyber incidents.
- Real-time replication of control systems (SCADA and DCS) and failover to an alternate site if the main site goes down.
- Continuity across distributed infrastructures, where generation and distribution points are spread across multiple sites with critical communication links.
The Iberian Peninsula blackout
On April 28, 2025, a massive blackout affected Spain, Portugal, Andorra, and parts of southwest France, cutting power to much of the population for almost ten hours. The outage paralyzed transportation, telecommunications, and emergency services, with an estimated impact of 31 GW of disconnected load.
The incident highlighted how failures in the power grid can trigger cascading effects across critical sectors. For energy operators, having disaster recovery plans that include alternative sites and real-time failover mechanisms is essential to ensure continuity during large-scale events.
Pharmaceutical and healthcare sector: protecting sensitive data and meeting regulations
Healthcare and pharmaceutical organizations handle highly sensitive information: medical records, clinical trial results, and research data.
These environments are governed by strict regulatory frameworks such as GDPR in Europe or HIPAA in the U.S., which require data availability and confidentiality at all times.
Applying DRaaS in the healthcare and pharmaceutical sector makes it possible to:
- Integrate hybrid environments, combining legacy applications with cloud platforms without compromising continuity.
- Adjust RTOs and RPOs based on service criticality: minimal recovery times for emergency systems and greater tolerance for research repositories, where data integrity takes priority.
- Replicate clinical databases and hospital systems in real time, ensuring immediate recovery in case of failure or cyberattack.
- Ensure traceability and auditability, with automatic reports from recovery tests and replication cycle monitoring.
The Dedalus data breach
In 2022, French company Dedalus Biologie was fined €1.5 million by CNIL after a data breach exposed medical information of nearly 500,000 patients. The leak included test results, identity details, and contact data, constituting a serious GDPR violation.
The incident highlighted the need for secure replication mechanisms, continuous traceability, and auditing to detect unauthorized access and ensure the integrity of clinical systems. Cases like Dedalus underline the importance of integrating DRaaS not only for availability, but also to ensure strict regulatory compliance.
Technology and SaaS sector: continuous availability in digital environments
SaaS providers rely on complex architectures combining microservices, CI/CD pipelines, and multi-cloud deployments. Guaranteeing 24/7 availability with tightly adjusted RTOs and RPOs is essential to maintain service continuity and meet SLAs promised to end customers.
A DRaaS solution allows production environments to be replicated in real time and failover to be executed immediately in the event of a site failure or security incident. Compatibility with multiple platforms (VMware, Hyper-V, OpenStack, AWS, Azure, GCP) ensures recovery strategies adapt to heterogeneous infrastructures without vendor lock-in.
In SaaS environments, DRaaS delivers specific advantages:
- Isolated failover scenarios in case of ransomware, limiting impact to secure environments and minimizing multi-tenant exposure.
- Differentiated RTO/RPO policies for critical microservices (e.g., authentication or payments) versus less sensitive modules.
- Integration of recovery tests into CI/CD cycles without interrupting deployments or staging environments.
- Scalable protection of data and workloads in line with unpredictable user base growth.
- Compliance with SLA commitments on availability.
The CrowdStrike incident
In July 2024, a faulty update to CrowdStrike’s Falcon Sensor security software rendered more than 8 million Windows devices inoperable. The issue affected SaaS and cloud service providers worldwide, interrupting critical applications and exposing the fragility of dependency chains in digital environments.
The case demonstrated the importance of having recovery mechanisms and backup environments prepared for large-scale failures, as well as validation and rollback processes that restore operations quickly. For SaaS platforms with strict availability commitments, embedding DRaaS capabilities is essential to protect both continuity and customer trust.
DRaaS at Adam
Each sector has its own particularities, but they all share a common need: ensuring business continuity in any scenario.
Adam’s DRaaS service addresses this challenge with optimized RTOs and RPOs, advanced compatibility, and 24/7 expert support, backed by our own data centers in Barcelona and Madrid certified with ISO 22301 and ISO 27001. These accreditations guarantee that our processes meet the highest standards of continuity and information security.
At Adam, we help our clients design and implement disaster recovery plans tailored to their infrastructure, so they can operate with confidence under any contingency.
Download the DRaaS datasheet to learn more about specifications, requirements, and implementation options.
This article has been written by
Adriana Conde