For years, disaster recovery was the gold standard of business continuity planning. Organizations invested in replication, failover, and tested runbooks to protect against physical failures, human error, and localized outages. That architecture worked, and for many organizations, it still does.
But the threat landscape has fundamentally shifted. Ransomware, supply chain attacks, and sophisticated intrusions don’t just disrupt operations; they corrupt the very data you’re counting on to recover. And when that happens, a traditional DR architecture isn’t just insufficient. It can actively work against you.
That’s why Xigent developed Cyber Recovery as a Service (CRaaS): a purpose-built evolution of our disaster recovery infrastructure that addresses the unique demands of cyber-event recovery without sacrificing the speed and reliability our clients already depend on.
Traditional disaster recovery is designed around a simple premise: something in your environment failed, and you need to restore it quickly. The data is trusted. The recovery point is clean. The goal is speed.
Cyber recovery turns that model on its head.
When an organization experiences a ransomware attack or a breach, the data itself may be compromised, and the exact moment of compromise is rarely obvious. Recovering quickly to an infected state doesn’t restore the business. It restarts the problem. Worse, organizations navigating cyber events often face external constraints: insurance carriers, legal counsel, and government entities may have a say in how and when recovery happens, which can delay or complicate traditional DR execution.
A recovery architecture that can’t account for these realities isn’t a safety net. It’s a liability.
When we began designing CRaaS, we established three non-negotiable requirements.
RPO and RTO had to stay low. Our clients came to us because we could deliver recovery within minutes to hours. We weren’t willing to accept a solution where cyber recovery took days or weeks. Whatever enhancements we added to address cyber-specific threats, they couldn’t come at the cost of recovery speed.
Recovery had to be fully independent of the client’s production environment. This is especially critical in cyber events, where third parties may be controlling or auditing the on-premise recovery process. Our clients needed a path to business continuity that didn’t depend on, or wait for, their own compromised infrastructure.
Third, the architecture had to serve both DR and CR workloads. Not every declared event is a ransomware attack, and not every ransomware attack demands the same recovery posture. We needed independent runbooks for each scenario: one path for fast, full restoration and another for low-and-slow validation before any recovered workload touches a production network.
The CRaaS environment is designed around one core principle: isolation at every layer. Here’s how it works from ingress to recovery.
All traffic entering the Xigent environment passes through border gateway firewalling for packet inspection. From there, each client lands in their own dedicated virtual firewall with independent configuration and network segmentation, ensuring true multi-tenancy and eliminating lateral risk between clients.
Critical workloads that require continuity (Active Directory, DNS, PAM solutions, databases) are maintained in a segregated management plane. This allows those applications to function appropriately during a recovery event without being exposed to or contaminated by a compromised production environment.
Before any data is written to the recovery vault, it passes through an inspection layer that performs entropy analysis and malware pattern detection. Anything that appears suspicious is flagged and excluded from usable recovery points. The replication toolset supports granular, discrete version recovery (DVRS), so clients can roll back to a specific known-good moment with precision.
Clean, validated data lands in a high-performance primary vault. From there, it’s also written to a physically air-gapped secondary vault for long-term retention. Even if something were to breach the primary recovery environment, those secondary recovery points remain completely isolated and intact.
One of the most overlooked gaps in recovery planning is validation. Knowing data is clean and knowing it will actually function are two different things. Our staging environment allows clients to test recovered workloads in isolation, validating health, data integrity, and application functionality, before anything is exposed to a wider network. This is also where we conduct our biennial DR and CR testing with clients.
Once workloads are verified as known-good, they’re instantiated in the recovery environment. From here, clients can either enable end-user access via pre-established business continuity plans, or, once the production site is cleared, initiate a reverse sync to restore operations back on-premise.
There are a lot of vendors offering some version of cyber recovery. The architectural details are where the real differences live.
The organizations most affected by ransomware and cyber events aren’t those without security tools. They’re organizations that had good security but no validated recovery plan. When prevention fails, and statistically, it will, the question isn’t whether you can detect the attack. It’s whether you can recover from it on your terms.
CRaaS was built to answer that question.
Contact Xigent today to schedule a conversation with one of our CRaaS experts. We will walk through how CRaaS would work in your environment, what recovery would look like, and how it compares to your current DR approach.