Most business leaders assume their disaster recovery plan covers a ransomware attack. It doesn't – and that gap could be the difference between a two-hour recovery and a two-week crisis. Research shows that roughly 40% of organizations take a month or more to recover from a ransomware incident,1 and for many businesses, that timeline ends operations.
In this blog, we'll walk through the differences between disaster recovery and cyber recovery, and explain what you need for true cyber resilience.
Traditional disaster recovery handles infrastructure failures, such as server outages or power failures. In emergency scenarios like these, you know what happened, the threat is over, and your only job is to restore systems from a clean, recent backup.
Cybersecurity incident recovery is a different problem entirely. When ransomware hits, a few things are true that aren't true in a typical outage:
The threat may still be active inside your network.
You don't always know how far back the corruption goes.
Restoring from a standard backup can bring the malware right back with it.
This is the disconnect the OnDemand team sees most often when we review a client's disaster recovery plan. It's built to deal with equipment failure, not a live attacker. Those require different playbooks, different infrastructure, and different recovery expectations.
A lot of businesses feel protected against cyber attackers because they run regular backups. That's a good start, but it's not the same as being ready for a ransomware event. If your current plan doesn't include these components, it probably won't hold up against a real cyber incident:
These are copies of your data that an attacker can't reach or alter, even if they have access to the rest of your network. Without this, your backups are just another target.
A place to restore and inspect systems that's fully isolated from your production network, so you don't reintroduce the same threat you just recovered from.
Running your recovery process in a sandboxed environment before you actually need it. This used to be optional. It isn't anymore.
Building legitimate cyber resilience in-house is expensive and hard to maintain. Air-gapped data storage, clean rooms, 24/7 monitoring, and regular failover testing require specialized infrastructure and staff that most companies just don't have.
That’s where disaster recovery as a service, or DRaaS, comes in. Instead of building and managing this yourself, you get it as a managed service with clear performance guarantees.
At OnDemand, we work with 11:11 Systems as a preferred DRaaS partner because they build their solutions to handle both standard disaster recovery and true cyber incident recovery.
There are several reasons why this partnership works for our clients, including:
Support for physical and virtualized workloads across on-prem, AWS, and Azure environments, so you're not locked into a single infrastructure approach.
24/7/365 managed recovery by the 11:11 Systems team means you're not the one on call at 2 am trying to figure out what to restore first.
Their Cyber Recovery Platform, built with Cohesity, is specifically designed for ransomware and cyber incidents, not just repurposed disaster recovery tooling.
This is the kind of setup we recommend when a client wants confidence that their recovery plan actually works against a modern threat, not just a server outage.
Most businesses don't know whether their disaster recovery plan would survive a real cyber incident until they're in the middle of one. That's not a great time to find out.
OnDemand helps businesses evaluate their current setup and identify gaps before they become problems. Our team will walk through your current disaster recovery plan and show you exactly what holds up and what doesn't, using a real cyber incident as the benchmark.
If you want a clear picture of where you stand, we're here to help. Request a cyber resilience assessment today.
Sources:
1. https://cyberfortress.com/blog/backup-is-the-easy-part-what-ransomware-has-done-to-recovery-in-2026