DRaaS cost is one of the few IT budget lines that most UK businesses genuinely cannot benchmark. Ask three providers what disaster recovery as a service should cost and you will get a per-VM subscription, a per-gigabyte replication fee and a bespoke managed quote — three numbers that cannot be compared without unpicking what each one actually includes. That confusion is profitable for vendors and expensive for you.
This guide puts real figures on the table. It walks through the published UK prices for the two big hyperscale replication services, the bands that managed DRaaS quotes typically land in, and a fully worked 40-VM budget you can adapt to your own estate. It also lists the DRaaS costs that never appear on the first quote — test failovers, egress at failback, duplicated licences — which routinely add 30% or more to the headline figure.
The stakes are not theoretical. The government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025 found that 43% of UK businesses identified a breach or attack in the last twelve months, and the estimated share of businesses hit by ransomware doubled from under 0.5% to 1% in a single year. Disaster recovery as a service exists precisely for the day one of those incidents, a flood or a failed hypervisor takes your systems down. The question is not whether to pay for recovery — it is how much, and for what.
Table of contents
- What Disaster Recovery as a Service Actually Covers
- DRaaS Cost Benchmarks: What UK Businesses Pay in 2026
- What Drives DRaaS Cost Up or Down
- Worked Example: DRaaS Cost for a 40-VM UK Business
- DRaaS vs Backup-Only vs a Second Site
- The Hidden DRaaS Costs Nobody Puts on the Quote
- How to Cut Your DRaaS Cost Without Cutting Protection
- References
What Disaster Recovery as a Service Actually Covers
Before any DRaaS cost makes sense, be precise about what the service is. Disaster recovery as a service continuously replicates your servers — usually virtual machines — to a second environment run by someone else, keeps that replica within minutes or hours of live, and gives you a button to bring it up when your primary site fails. You pay a subscription for the standby copy; you only pay full compute prices when you actually fail over.
DRaaS is not backup, and the price reflects it
A backup is a periodic copy you restore from, over hours or days. DRaaS is a continuously synchronised standby you switch to, in minutes or hours. Our guide to backup vs disaster recovery vs high availability covers the distinction in depth, but the budget consequence is simple: backup protects data, DRaaS protects uptime, and uptime costs more. A backup-only estate might spend a few hundred pounds a month; a DRaaS cost for the same estate will be three to ten times that.
RTO and RPO are the two dials that set the price
Every disaster recovery quote is really pricing two numbers: how quickly you must be running again (recovery time objective) and how much data you can afford to lose (recovery point objective). Tighter targets mean more frequent replication, more standby storage and more engineering. If you have not set these targets yet, do it first — our RTO and RPO calculator guide shows how to derive them from downtime cost rather than guesswork. Buying a one-hour RTO for a workload that could tolerate a day is the single most common way UK firms inflate their DRaaS cost.
What the subscription fee does and does not include
A typical DRaaS subscription covers the replication software, orchestrated failover plans and the standby infrastructure reservation. It usually does not include the storage the replicas consume, the compute you burn during tests and real failovers, data egress when you fail back, or anyone actually managing the service. Those arrive as separate meters — which is why two quotes with identical headline per-VM prices can produce very different annual bills.
DRaaS Cost Benchmarks: What UK Businesses Pay in 2026
There are three honest reference points for DRaaS cost in the UK market: the published prices of the hyperscale replication engines, the per-VM bands that managed service quotes land in, and the fully loaded cost of running your own second site. Everything else is negotiation.
Published hyperscaler list prices
Microsoft publishes Azure Site Recovery pricing per protected instance per month: £18.81 per VM replicating from your site to Azure (UK South list price), or £12.04 per VM if you replicate to a second site you own, with every instance free for its first 31 days. AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery is billed per source server per hour at $0.028 — roughly $20.44 per server per month. Both figures are the software layer only: replica storage, test compute and recovery compute are metered on top at standard rates.
Managed DRaaS quote bands
When a UK provider wraps those engines — or their own platform — in monitoring, runbooks, testing and an on-call recovery team, quotes typically land between £25 and £75 per protected VM per month depending on RTO, data churn and how much of the recovery work they own. Small estates pay the top of the band; estates past a hundred VMs negotiate towards the bottom. A fully managed DRaaS cost of £40–£50 per VM per month is a reasonable midpoint to sanity-check any quote against.
Why two quotes for the same estate differ by 3×
The spread is rarely margin. One provider quotes a 24-hour RTO with weekly tested runbooks; another quotes a 2-hour RTO with quarterly full failover rehearsals and a named engineer. One includes 90 days of replica retention; another includes seven. Before comparing DRaaS costs, force every quote onto the same RTO, RPO, retention and testing schedule — the ranking usually changes.
| Pricing model | How it is billed | Published example | Best fit | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Per-VM subscription | Fixed monthly fee per protected instance | Azure Site Recovery: £18.81/VM/month to Azure | Steady estates that want predictable DRaaS cost | Storage and test compute metered separately |
| Per-server usage | Hourly rate while replication runs | AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery: $0.028/server/hour | Variable estates; short-term protection | Replication servers, EBS and drills billed on top |
| Per-GB replication | Fee per gigabyte protected or changed | Common in provider-owned platforms | Small VM counts with large data sets | Data growth silently inflates the bill |
| Fully managed per-VM | Monthly fee incl. runbooks, testing, on-call | Typical UK band £25–£75/VM/month | Firms without in-house recovery skills | Confirm the testing cadence is in writing |
What Drives DRaaS Cost Up or Down
Two 40-VM businesses can pay wildly different amounts for the same nominal service. These are the variables doing the work, in rough order of impact.
VM count, data volume and churn
Most DRaaS pricing scales per protected VM, so the fastest saving is simply protecting fewer machines. Data volume sets the standby storage bill, and daily change rate (churn) sets the replication bandwidth and the storage transactions. A database server writing 200 GB of changes a day costs materially more to protect than a file server of the same size that barely changes — even at the same per-VM rate.
Recovery targets and standby temperature
A “cold” DRaaS arrangement — replicas exist but must be powered up and configured — is the cheapest tier. “Warm” standby with pre-staged networking recovers in an hour or two for a mid-band DRaaS cost. “Hot” standby with near-instant cutover approaches the price of simply running everything twice. Each step down in RTO roughly doubles what you should expect to pay, which is why the RTO conversation must happen before the procurement one.
Compliance, retention and sector obligations
Regulated firms — financial services, legal, healthcare — often need longer replica retention, UK-only data residency, immutable recovery points and evidence of tested recovery for auditors. Each requirement is legitimate, and each adds to the DRaaS cost. Retention is the quiet one: keeping 90 days of recovery points instead of seven can multiply the storage component several times over.
Who runs the recovery
The engine prices above assume your team configures replication, writes failover runbooks, tests them and executes the recovery at 3am. If that is not realistic — and the Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025 found only 53% of medium businesses maintain documented incident response procedures at all — the managed premium is not padding; it is the service. A provider of managed IT services will bundle DR management with day-to-day support, which is usually cheaper than buying the two separately.
Worked Example: DRaaS Cost for a 40-VM UK Business
Numbers beat adjectives, so here is a complete budget for a typical mid-sized estate. Assume 40 protected VMs, 10 TB of replicated storage, moderate churn, a 4-hour RTO and a 1-hour RPO. For planning we allow £325 a month for replica storage, vault and networking on either hyperscaler route, and we convert dollars at $1.25 to £1.
The self-managed Azure route
Azure Site Recovery software: 40 VMs × £18.81 = £752.40 a month. Add the £325 storage and networking allowance and the platform bill is £1,077 a month, or £12,929 a year — before your team’s time to configure, test and maintain it. The first 31 days per instance are free, which softens month one but changes nothing thereafter.
The self-managed AWS route
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery: 40 servers × $20.44 = $817.60 a month, which is £654 at our planning rate. Add the same £325 allowance for replication infrastructure and storage and the platform bill is £979 a month, or £11,748 a year. As with Azure, drills and real recoveries spin up EC2 and EBS billed at standard rates on top.
The managed route and the do-it-twice route
At the £50 midpoint of the managed band, 40 VMs cost £2,000 a month — £24,000 a year — with testing, runbooks and the 3am execution included. The comparison ceiling is running your own second site: duplicated hardware, colocation, links and licences typically translate to £4,000–£6,500 a month for an estate this size, £5,250 at midpoint. One takeaway sentence before the chart: for this estate, managed DRaaS costs roughly twice the self-managed platform bill, and an owned second site costs roughly five times it.
Reading the numbers honestly
The platform routes look cheap because they exclude labour. If configuring replication, maintaining runbooks and running quarterly tests takes your team even four days a quarter, price that time and add it. For many firms the honest self-managed DRaaS cost lands within £300–£500 a month of the managed quote — at which point paying a specialist to own the 3am call is not extravagance.
DRaaS vs Backup-Only vs a Second Site
The right question is not “is this DRaaS cost high?” but “compared to what?” There are only three realistic postures for a UK business, and each has a defensible use case.
Backup-only: the £250–£450 posture
Immutable, off-site, tested backups — the NCSC’s baseline advice for ransomware resilience — protect an estate this size for roughly £250–£450 a month. What you give up is time: restoring 40 VMs from backup is a one-to-several-day project. If every workload you run could genuinely be down for two days without serious harm, this posture is rational and DRaaS is optional.
DRaaS: the middle posture most SMEs should price
DRaaS buys the recovery-time insurance backup cannot: hours instead of days, tested and rehearsed. At £1,000–£2,000 a month for our example estate, its annual cost of £12,000–£24,000 compares against the government’s £1,600 average cost of the most disruptive breach — a figure that masks multi-week outages at the tail, which are exactly what DRaaS exists to cap. Firms that quantify a day of downtime at £10,000 or more rarely conclude the DRaaS cost is the expensive option.
A second site: for those with obligations, not preferences
Owning recovery infrastructure makes sense when regulators, insurers or contracts demand full control, or when the estate is large enough that £60,000+ a year of DRaaS fees would fund the hardware anyway. For everyone else it is the most expensive way to buy the same outcome — and it still needs the testing discipline the cheaper routes need.
| Posture | Typical recovery time | Monthly cost, 40-VM estate | 3-year cost at midpoint | Right when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Backup-only | 1–3 days | £250–£450 | £12,600 | Downtime tolerance is measured in days |
| Self-managed DRaaS | 2–8 hours | £979–£1,077 + labour | £37,008 | Skilled in-house team with time to test |
| Managed DRaaS | 1–4 hours | £1,000–£3,000 | £72,000 | Recovery must work without your team |
| Own second site | Minutes–hours | £4,000–£6,500 | £189,000 | Regulation or scale demands full control |
The 3-year column is simply each posture’s midpoint monthly figure multiplied by 36 — £350, £1,028, £2,000 and £5,250 respectively. Seen over that horizon, the gap between doing nothing beyond backup and full DRaaS is real but survivable; the gap between DRaaS and an owned second site is transformational, and most businesses cross it for the wrong reasons.
Every experienced buyer has a story about the DRaaS cost that appeared in month four. These are the recurring culprits — budget for them up front and the service stops producing surprises.
Test failovers are metered
A disaster recovery plan you have not tested is a hypothesis. But every test failover spins up real compute in the recovery environment, billed at standard rates for its duration. A quarterly test that runs 20 VMs for two days is a few hundred pounds a time on hyperscaler rates — cheap insurance, but only if it is in the budget. The NCSC’s free Exercise in a Box service is a good complement for rehearsing the human side without spinning up anything.
Failback egress and the cost of going home
Failing over to the cloud is cheap to start; coming back is where data transfer charges live. After a real incident you may need to move terabytes of changed data back to your rebuilt primary site, and outbound data from a cloud platform is billed per gigabyte. For a 10 TB estate, failback egress can reach four figures — a one-off, incurred on the worst week of your year. Ask every provider to state the failback path and its price before you sign.
Licences, appliances and the quiet duplicates
Windows Server, SQL Server and line-of-business licences may need to be valid in the recovery environment; some vendors licence generously for DR, others do not. Replication appliances consume a VM’s worth of resources on your side. And an unmonitored replication agent that has silently stopped is both a recovery risk and a cybersecurity liability — stale replicas are precisely the backups attackers hope you have. Line these items up once, in writing, per workload.
| Hidden item | When it bites | Typical impact | How to control it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Test failover compute | Every rehearsal | Hundreds of pounds per test | Scope tests; agree cadence in contract |
| Failback egress | After a real invocation | Four figures on a 10 TB estate | Get the failback price in writing |
| Replica storage growth | Quietly, every month | Bill drifts up 10–20% a year | Set retention deliberately; review quarterly |
| Duplicated licences | At audit or invocation | Varies by vendor | Confirm DR rights per product up front |
| Management time | Always, if self-managed | Days per quarter | Price it; compare against managed band |
How to Cut Your DRaaS Cost Without Cutting Protection
Most estates can reduce their DRaaS cost by a quarter to a half without moving a single recovery target for the workloads that matter. The saving comes from precision, not bravery.
Tier the estate — most VMs do not need DRaaS
List every server and ask the ugly question: what actually breaks if this is down for two days? Domain controllers, the ERP database and the phone platform justify hours-level recovery. The intranet, the test environment and the archive file server justify backup-only. A typical 40-VM estate protects 15–20 machines with disaster recovery as a service and covers the rest with backup — instantly halving the per-VM subscription without touching the recovery promise that matters.
Buy the RTO you can prove you need
Because each step down in recovery time roughly doubles the price, unproven urgency is the most expensive habit in DR procurement. Derive the targets from downtime cost, write them down, and buy exactly that. Revisit annually: estates change, and last year’s DRaaS cost assumptions rarely survive an acquisition, a new line-of-business system or a move to SaaS applications that carry their own resilience.
Test smarter, not never
Skipping tests to save money converts your subscription into theatre. Instead, scope them: test the tier-one runbook fully twice a year, test the rest by sampling, and rehearse the decision-making with a tabletop exercise in between. Our cloud disaster recovery testing checklist sets out a cadence that keeps evidence fresh for auditors and insurers without burning test-compute budget every month.
Negotiate the meters, not just the rate
The per-VM rate is the number everyone haggles over, but retention length, included test hours, failback terms and storage rates move more money over three years. A provider who drops the headline DRaaS cost by 10% while halving your included testing has made the deal worse. Take both quotes back to the same specification, then negotiate the meters — and re-run the comparison at renewal, because list prices and your estate both move.
References
Azure Site Recovery Pricing — Microsoft Azure
AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery Pricing — Amazon Web Services
Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025 — GOV.UK
Mitigating Malware and Ransomware Attacks — NCSC
Offline Backups in an Online World — NCSC
Incident Management Collection — NCSC
NIST SP 800-34 Rev. 1: Contingency Planning Guide for Federal Information Systems
NIST SP 1800-11: Data Integrity — Recovering from Ransomware and Other Destructive Events