Choosing a UK disaster recovery provider: the 9 questions that matter

UK Disaster Recovery providers — 11:11 Systems (ex-Sungard), Daisy, IPL, IOmart, Pulsant DRaaS, plus Azure Site Recovery + AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery + Veeam Cloud Connect partners — all promise the same thing: "we'll recover you when the worst happens". The differences only show up during a real DR invocation. These are the 9 questions to ask before signing.

DR options — hot, warm, cold compared

The 9 questions every UK DR RFP should ask

•1. What's your guaranteed RTO per workload tier? Get the number in writing.
•2. What's your guaranteed RPO? Continuous replication, hourly, daily, nightly?
•3. How many invocation hours per year are included? Most contracts include 4 / 8 / 16 hours; excess hours are expensive.
•4. How often do you test? Quarterly tests are standard. Annual tests are insufficient.
•5. Show me a real test report. The format + depth tells you a lot.
•6. What's your declaration process + decision rights? Who decides we're invoking?
•7. Where is the recovery site? Same UK region? Different UK region? Cross-EU?
•8. Resource contention — if 5 customers invoke simultaneously, do you have capacity for all of us?
•9. Exit assistance — when we leave you, what data + config do we get back?

DRaaS vs cloud-native DR vs traditional DR

Traditional DR (sync replication to your own DR site + colo): highest cost, lowest RTO/RPO, most operational complexity. Best for genuine mission-critical workloads where seconds matter.

DRaaS (provider hosts DR site + replication infrastructure): mid-cost, mid-RTO/RPO, provider operational complexity. Best for mid-market.

Cloud-native DR (Azure Site Recovery / AWS Elastic DR): lowest cost at the right scale, RPO/RTO competitive, requires cloud-native operational maturity.

Backup-based DR (Veeam Cloud Connect / Rubrik Cloud Vault): cheapest but RTO measured in hours-days not minutes. Acceptable for non-critical workloads.

Pick a DR posture per workload tier

What Servnet does

Servnet partners with UK DRaaS providers + Veeam Cloud Connect + Azure Site Recovery + AWS Elastic DR. We help customers run DR provider selection vendor-neutrally + structure the contract sensibly.

For most UK mid-market customers, the practical answer is: Veeam Backup & Replication with Cloud Connect to a UK provider for tier-2/3 workloads + Azure Site Recovery for tier-1 cloud-native. See our backup platform buyer's guide for the upstream choice.

FAQs — Choosing a UK disaster recovery provider

Sizing

What RTO / RPO do I actually need?

Tier 1 mission-critical (trading floor, clinical systems, eCommerce): RTO < 1 hour, RPO < 15 min. Tier 2 important (email, file shares, business apps): RTO 4-8 hours, RPO 4 hours. Tier 3 background (archive, dev/test): RTO 24-48 hours, RPO 24 hours. Don't over-pay for Tier-1 RTO/RPO on Tier-2 workloads.

Testing

How do we run a real DR test?

Quarterly tabletop + annual full-invocation test is the gold standard. Servnet supports both — we run the test alongside your team, document outcomes, identify gaps, retest 60-90 days later. Talk to us about scoping.