With the growing rate of Australian cyber attacks - there is one thing your business needs

In 2025, cyber threats are impacting Australian businesses more severely than ever.

Ransomware. Nation-state attacks. Data exfiltration. These are no longer just enterprise problems. Today, even mid-sized businesses and local councils are in the firing line. One moment you’re running smoothly; the next, you’re offline, locked out of your own systems. In this environment, data protection and data security are critical, as organisations must ensure the integrity and availability of their data during and after disruptive events.

What separates the organisations back online within hours from those stuck in limbo for days or weeks? It’s not just backup. It’s Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). A robust business continuity plan, which includes disaster recovery initiatives, is essential for maintaining operations and ensuring seamless recovery when disruptions occur.

What is DRaaS – and why backup isn’t enough

Let’s clear something up: backups alone don’t make you disaster-ready. Yes, they help you recover your data – eventually. But can you afford to be down for days while rebuilding infrastructure, restoring systems, and figuring out what actually works?

DRaaS replicates your entire IT environment – servers, apps, data, and configurations – in a secure cloud environment. DRaaS leverages cloud services to host disaster recovery systems, enabling rapid automatic failover and supporting disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solutions for enhanced business resilience. So when disaster strikes, you can failover fast. Think hours, not days.

The Missing Link’s DRaaS solution provides:

• ISO-certified recovery into Microsoft Azure

• Self-managed, Gold, and Platinum tiers

• Annual failover testing to prove it works under pressure

• SLA-backed failover in under 2 hours – guaranteed for critical workloads source

• Cost efficiency: Cloud-based DRaaS eliminates upfront capital investments and offers pay-as-you-go pricing, reducing infrastructure and operational expenses

The rising cost of downtime and business continuity for Australian businesses

Every minute matters. In 2025, the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute (Gartner). Beyond the immediate financial hit, there’s reputational damage, customer churn, and compliance risk. Achieving minimal downtime with effective disaster recovery solutions is essential to maintain business continuity and protect your reputation.

Still relying on tape backups or manual recovery plans? You’re gambling with:

• Extended downtime during ransomware attacks

• Data loss from unreliable or untested data backup processes puts vital business resources like customer records and software at risk

• Non-compliance with evolving cyber regulations

• Reduced cyber insurance payouts due to poor resilience posture

Gartner reports cyber security is the top tech investment for Australian CIOs in 2025, with disaster recovery now central to risk management strategies (Gartner CIO insights).

Infrastructure and data storage: The hidden backbone of cyber resilience

When it comes to disaster recovery, the strength of your infrastructure and data storage is what truly determines your ability to ensure business continuity and minimise downtime during unexpected events. Whether facing natural disasters, cyber attacks, or hardware failures, having a resilient foundation is essential to protect critical data and support rapid recovery processes.

Modern disaster recovery solutions are built on a blend of on-premise and cloud-based infrastructure—think virtual machines, cloud storage, and enterprise-grade data centres. By leveraging cloud resources, Australian businesses can create a disaster recovery strategy that is both scalable and flexible, ensuring rapid restoration of critical systems and minimal disruption to business operations.

One of the key benefits of cloud disaster recovery is the ability to store backup data securely off-site, reducing the risk of data loss and enabling businesses to restore data quickly, even in the face of unforeseen events. This approach not only mitigates risks from physical infrastructure failures but also provides a cost-efficient alternative to traditional on-premise solutions, eliminating the need for significant upfront investment in hardware and reducing the risk of equipment failures.

A comprehensive disaster recovery plan should go beyond just infrastructure and data storage. It must include clear procedures for crisis response, address various disaster scenarios, and outline strategies to counter cyber threats and human error. By identifying potential risks and developing robust recovery processes, businesses can ensure they are prepared to respond rapidly and effectively when disruption occurs.

For Australian organisations, the stakes are even higher. The country’s exposure to natural disasters like bushfires and floods, combined with the rising tide of cyber threats, makes disaster recovery planning not just important, but essential. Investing in enterprise-grade disaster recovery solutions helps protect critical systems, maintain continuous operation, and uphold customer trust, even when the unexpected happens.

Cloud-based disaster recovery services, especially those delivered by a trusted cloud service provider, offer significant advantages. Managed services can relieve the burden on internal IT teams, allowing them to focus on core business operations while ensuring that disaster recovery plans are always up to date and tested. These solutions also support digital transformation initiatives, enabling businesses to adapt quickly to changing technology landscapes and regulatory requirements.

To maximise the effectiveness of your disaster recovery strategy, your plan should define clear recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO), ensuring that critical data and systems can be restored within acceptable timeframes. Regular testing, continuous monitoring, and employee training are also vital to maintain data integrity and minimise the risk of human error.

Ultimately, robust infrastructure and data storage are the hidden backbone of any successful disaster recovery plan. By prioritising disaster recovery planning, leveraging cloud resources, and investing in enterprise-grade solutions, Australian businesses can protect their critical data, minimise downtime, and ensure high availability, no matter what disaster scenario arises. In today’s threat landscape, disaster recovery is a business imperative.

Is your disaster recovery plan ready?

Ask yourself:

• Can your business recover from a full outage in under 2 hours?

• When was your last disaster recovery test?

• Do you have recovery SLAs that match your risk profile?

• Can you failover workloads to the cloud without data loss?

• Is your plan aligned with modern cyber insurance expectations?

• Does your disaster recovery plan define clear recovery objectives, including both recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO)?

If you answered “no” or “not sure” to any of these, it’s time to review your resilience.

Also consider:

• Windows 10 support ends in October 2025, increasing the risk of unpatched endpoints—keeping your operating system up to date is critical for disaster recovery planning

• Businesses without tested DR plans saw 37% longer downtime in 2024, based on industry trends

• Faster recovery directly reduces the cost and impact of data breaches

Key components of an effective disaster recovery plan include managed DRaaS solutions, virtual servers, and cloud-based services.

Take action: Cyber resilience starts with DRaaS

You can’t prevent every threat. But you can control how fast you recover.

The Missing Link’s DRaaS is trusted by organisations across finance, legal, healthcare, and retail. Our team builds bespoke recovery plans tailored to your environment – not a cookie-cutter template. As a comprehensive disaster recovery solution, our DRaaS ensures your business can recover data and maintain operations after unexpected events. Learn more about our DRaaS offering.

We handle:

• Custom workload replication

• Annual simulated failovers

• Continuous health monitoring

• Self-managed or fully managed service levels

• Option to leverage a private cloud for secure and compliant disaster recovery processes

Are you prepared?

Take our disaster-readiness test to see how you score.

**Your next disaster is coming. Make sure recovery is the least of your worries.

Want to understand just how costly downtime really is?
Use this breakdown to see what it could cost your business. Read our downtime impact blog here.