When a cyberattack hits your organization, the question is not whether you have backups; it is whether those backups are clean, isolated, and recoverable in hours, not days. Most businesses have invested in Backup as a Service (BaaS) or Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) and believe they are fully protected, but they are missing one piece.
The short answer: Cyber Recovery as a Service (CRaaS) is built to recover from attacks like ransomware and breaches by ensuring your recovery environment has never been compromised. Backup as a Service (BaaS) stores copies of your data, and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) focuses on restoring systems after a natural disaster or human failure. While BaaS and DRaaS play important roles, they are not designed to account for the specific risks that come with cyberattacks. If you only have BaaS or DRaaS, you are missing the layer that cyber threats specifically target.
Our blog breaks down exactly what separates these three solutions and how modern cyber recovery solutions like Xigent’s CRaaS close the gap most organizations don’t even know they have.
The cybersecurity landscape has changed faster than most recovery strategies. A decade ago, the primary threats were hardware failures, natural disasters, and accidental data loss. Those threats still exist, but today they share the stage with organized ransomware groups, state-sponsored intrusions, and malicious data exfiltration designed to steal and sell your data.
Most backup and disaster recovery tools were designed for the traditional threat model. They were not built to defend against an adversary who spends weeks inside your environment before detonating, and who may have already infected your backups.
According to IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report, the average breach goes undetected for 194 days. In that window, an attacker can corrupt, encrypt, or exfiltrate data, including the copies you plan to recover from. When the attack finally activates, your business continuity plan may point you directly to compromised data.
This is the gap that separates a complete cybersecurity recovery plan from one that only looks complete on paper.
Backup as a Service is a cloud-based model in which a third-party provider manages the backup, storage, and retention of your data on a scheduled basis. It is the foundation of any data protection strategy. For small data-loss events such as accidental deletion, a single corrupted file, or a failed update, it works exactly as intended.
BaaS is cost-effective, easy to manage, and reliable for protecting against everyday data loss. It automates the creation and storage of copies of your data, typically across multiple locations or cloud regions. For businesses without large IT teams, BaaS removes the operational burden of managing backup infrastructure in-house.
BaaS was not designed with adversarial threats in mind. Backups are typically connected to the same network environment as your production systems, meaning a ransomware attack that has infiltrated your environment may have already reached your backup copies before you are aware there is a problem. Many ransomware variants specifically target and encrypt backup repositories.
Additionally, BaaS does not include recovery orchestration. Restoring a full business environment from raw backups can take days or weeks, depending on the complexity of your systems. For executive leadership navigating a live cyber incident, that timeline is unacceptable.
BaaS is still necessary, but it is not sufficient as a standalone cybersecurity recovery plan.
Disaster Recovery as a Service takes the next step beyond BaaS. Rather than simply storing copies of your data, DRaaS replicates your full IT environment, such as your systems, applications, and data, to a secondary cloud environment that can be activated if your primary environment goes down.
Where BaaS protects data, DRaaS protects operations. In the event of a system failure, a natural disaster, or a hardware outage, DRaaS can spin up your replicated environment and restore business continuity within hours. It includes recovery orchestration, failover automation, and defined recovery time objectives (RTOs) and recovery point objectives (RPOs) that BaaS alone cannot match.
For traditional disaster scenarios, DRaaS is a powerful solution.
The fundamental architecture of DRaaS is continuous replication, and that is precisely where it breaks down against cyber threats. Because DRaaS mirrors your production environment in near real-time, any ransomware, malware, or corrupted data in your primary environment is replicated directly into your recovery environment.
When an attack activates, and you initiate a failover, you may be restoring from an already-infected image. Meaning the recovery environment itself is compromised. This is one of the primary reasons ransomware attackers specifically time their detonation to coincide with or follow backup cycles.
DRaaS does not include the forensic capabilities needed to identify a clean recovery point before the intrusion began, a critical requirement for any credible cybersecurity recovery plan.
Cyber Recovery as a Service is a purpose-built solution designed to recover from malicious cyber events, including ransomware, data breaches, insider threats, and sophisticated nation-state attacks. CRaaS was architected from the ground up to assume that your production environment may be compromised at the moment you need to recover.
When an attacker gets into your environment, they don’t just target production systems. They often move laterally into backups and recovery infrastructure, corrupting or encrypting everything they can reach. Without a truly isolated recovery environment, your last line of defense may already be compromised.
An air gap is a physical or logical barrier that isolates your clean recovery environment from all other networks, including your production systems, backup infrastructure, and the internet. Because the recovery vault is completely separated, an attacker who has fully compromised your primary environment cannot reach it.
Xigent’s CRaaS uses advanced air-gapped architecture to ensure that recovery data remains clean and uncompromised regardless of what happens in your production environment. Even in a worst-case scenario, with full encryption of production and backup systems, your CRaaS vault is untouched.
In a cyberattack, timing matters. The longer the gap between backups, the more data you risk losing and the harder it becomes to pinpoint a clean recovery point.
Traditional backups operate on schedules like hourly, daily, or weekly snapshots. If an attack occurs between snapshots, that data is gone. CRaaS leverages real-time recovery points that continuously capture your environment, enabling your team to recover to a specific clean moment.
For executives, this translates directly to reduced data loss and a faster path back to normal operations. Recovery time objectives are measured in hours, not days.
Industries subject to regulatory compliance, such as financial services, healthcare, legal, and government contracting, are facing increasing scrutiny regarding cyber resilience. Frameworks such as NIST CSF, ISO 27001, SOC 2, and HIPAA include explicit requirements for data integrity, recovery testing, and incident response. A robust cybersecurity recovery plan built on CRaaS directly addresses these requirements, including the mandatory failover testing documentation auditors demand.
| BaaS | DRaaS | CRaaS | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary Purpose | Data Retention | Operational Continuity | Cyber Threat Recovery |
| Protects against hardware failure | |||
| Protects against ransomware | Partial | ||
| Air-gapped vault | |||
| Clean recovery point identification | |||
| Real-time recovery points | Partial | ||
| Compliance documentation | Limited | Partial | |
| Threat containment | |||
| 24/7 monitoring | Varies | Varies | |
| Designed for malicious attacks |
Most mid-to-enterprise organizations need all three layers: BaaS as a data foundation, DRaaS for operational resilience, and CRaaS as the shield against cyber threats. The question is not which one to choose; it is whether your current cybersecurity recovery plan includes full protection.
If your current provider cannot answer these questions with specifics, your cyber recovery plan has gaps.
Xigent’s Cyber Recovery as a Service was built to address the specific failure points left exposed by BaaS and DRaaS. Our solution provides a comprehensive, cloud-based cyber recovery platform that combines air-gapped protection, real-time recovery points, 24/7 monitoring, and mandatory failover testing into a single managed service.
When an attack occurs, Xigent’s CRaaS ensures your recovery environment is clean, your data is uncompromised, and your team has a tested, documented path back to full operations, fast.
Key capabilities include:
Your next step: Contact Us to schedule a no-obligation consultation with Xigent’s Cyber Recovery team to assess your current recovery plan and identify gaps. In 30 minutes, you will know exactly where you stand and what it takes to close the gap.