Managed Backup vs BaaS vs DRaaS: What’s the Difference, and Which Do You Actually Need?

If everything goes down tomorrow, this is what really determines how fast you’re working again and how much work you lose.

Imagine it is the middle of tax season.

Your team is deep in returns, your case files and workpapers live on a few key servers, and an outage suddenly takes your main system offline.

Staff cannot reach QuickBooks or your tax suite, e-filings stall, and clients start calling. You know you are “backing things up” somewhere in the cloud, but you do not know how recent those backups are, how long a restore will take, or who actually owns getting you back online.

This is exactly where buzzwords start to hurt. One vendor sells you Backup as a Service, or BaaS. Another insists you need Disaster Recovery as a Service, or DRaaS. A third talks about fully managed backup services that supposedly “take care of everything”.

On paper, all three sound like they protect your data. In practice, they deliver very different outcomes when a CPA or law firm is staring at a deadline and everything is down.

For small and mid-sized professional firms, the real question is not “What is BaaS vs DRaaS” in abstract IT terms. The real question is how each option affects three very concrete risks:

• How much data you can afford to lose.
• How much productivity time you can afford to let go.
• Whether you can prove to regulators, clients, and cyber insurers that your backup and disaster recovery plan actually works.

This article will walk you through managed backup,BaaS, and DRaaS, as well as the differences between them, from that perspective. You will see exactly what each term means, how they relate to RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) in real outages, and how they map to requirements like the FTC Safeguards Rule and IRS Publication 4557. More importantly, you will get a practical decision path tailored to firms with limited in-house IT, so you can decide whether basic BaaS is enough or whether you actually need a unified managed backup and DRaaS partner to keep your practice running when it matters most.

First, What Problem are You Actually Trying to Solve?

Before you choose between managed backup, BaaS, and DRaaS, you need to be clear on the business problem you are solving. For a CPA or law firm, the goal is not “modernize IT”. It is to control three very specific risks that show up in real client work:

Risk 1: Data Loss, Not Just Accidental Deletion

The first risk is that critical data is lost, corrupted, or encrypted and you cannot get it back in a usable form. That could mean:

• A paralegal deletes a key folder from a matter.
• A staff accountant overwrites a client’s QuickBooks file with the wrong version.
• Ransomware encrypts your file server and any attached storage.

In each case, you need copies of that data that are recent enough, clean, and easy to restore. Backup as a Service solutions focus heavily on this problem, but the way backups are configured, how long they are retained, and whether they are immutable all depend on who is managing the service.

Risk 2: Downtime and Missed Deadlines

The second risk is downtime. Even if you have perfect backups, you can still be in serious trouble if it takes one or two days to restore systems and verify that they work.

• During tax season, several hours of downtime might translate directly into missed filings, overtime, and write-offs.
• In a litigation practice, a full day without access to case management and documents can put court deadlines at risk.

This is where disaster recovery and business continuity come in. DRaaS focuses on restoring not just files, but entire systems, so the firm can get back to a working state within a defined recovery time objective (RTO). Managed backup and DR providers combine backup, replication, and a runbook so you know in advance how you will get from “everything is down” back to “everyone is working again”.

Risk 3: Compliance, Cyber Insurance, and Proof

The third risk is often overlooked until renewal time: compliance and proof. Regulators, clients, and cyber insurers increasingly want evidence that your backup and disaster recovery processes are not just written in a policy, but actually tested.

For firms that handle sensitive financial or legal information, this usually means:

• Being able to show how often data is backed up and where it is stored.
• Demonstrating that you can restore from backups and that test restores happen regularly.
• Mapping your backup and recovery controls to frameworks like the FTC Safeguards Rule, IRS Publication 4557, or your written information security program (WISP).

Plain BaaS often gives you raw capability, such as backups stored in the cloud, but little structure around testing, documentation, or audit-ready reporting. Managed backup and DRaaS services are usually where those gaps are closed.

How RPO and RTO Frame the Decision

RPO and RTO sound like technical terms, but they are simply ways to put numbers on data loss and downtime.

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO): How much work you can afford to lose if you have to restore from a backup.
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO): How long you can afford to be down before you are in real trouble.

For example:

• If your RPO is 24 hours, nightly backups might be acceptable. In a restore, you accept that you could lose up to one business day of work.
• If your RPO is 1 hour during tax season, you need much more frequent backups of your tax and accounting systems.

Similarly:

• If your RTO is two days, a slower, manual restore process from BaaS might be fine.
• If your RTO is four hours, you probably need DRaaS capabilities and a provider that has already rehearsed how to fail over your environment.

Once partners agree on realistic RPO and RTO targets for the firm, the choice between managed backup, BaaS, and DRaaS gets much clearer:

• BaaS focuses on meeting your RPO, provided someone on your side can plan and execute recovery.
• DRaaS focuses on meeting your RTO by giving you somewhere to fail over to.
• Managed backup combines technology and people so that RPO, RTO, monitoring, testing, and documentation are handled as an ongoing service.

In other words, the real problem you are solving is not “Which acronym sounds best”, but “How much data can we afford to lose, how long can we realistically be down, and who will own making sure our backup and disaster recovery plan works when it counts?”

Managed Backup vs. BaaS vs. DRaaS: Clear Definitions

Now that you have the real problem in view, it is easier to unpack what each option actually delivers. Managed backup, Backup as a Service (BaaS), and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) overlap, but they are not interchangeable. If you treat them as synonyms, you end up with gaps that only show up during an outage.

What is Managed Backup?

Managed backup is a service model where a specialist provider designs, implements, and runs your backup strategy for you on an ongoing basis. It is not just “some software that backs up to the cloud”. It is a combination of technology plus people and process.

In a managed backup service, you should expect the provider to:

• Work with you to define RPO and RTO for key systems, especially tax, accounting, and case management applications.
• Choose and configure the backup tools, schedules, and retention policies to hit those targets.
• Monitor backup jobs every day, investigate failures, and fix issues before they turn into data loss.
• Perform regular test restores, document the results, and share reports you can use with regulators, clients, and cyber insurers.
• Maintain offsite, encrypted copies, and often immutable copies that cannot be altered by ransomware or a rogue user.

For a 10 to 20-person CPA firm, a typical managed backup setup might include:

• Hourly backups for critical servers during tax season, with less frequent backups off-season.
• Application-aware backups for QuickBooks, tax software, and SQL databases.
• At least 30 to 90 days of retention, sometimes longer for specific data sets.
• Quarterly restore tests, logged and available for audits.

Some managed backup providers also include “light DR” features, such as the ability to quickly bring a failed server up as a virtual machine in their cloud during an incident. Others pair managed backup with a separate DRaaS service, which we will cover next.

The key idea is ownership. With managed backup, you are paying someone to own the backup strategy, the day-to-day health of backups, and the proof that restores will work.

What is Backup as a Service (BaaS)?

Backup as a Service, or BaaS, is usually a subscription that gives you backup software plus storage in the provider’s cloud. It solves the problem of “Where do we put all these backups, and how do we get them offsite?” without necessarily solving “Who makes sure this all works end-to-end?”

In a BaaS model, you typically get:

• Agents or connectors that back up servers, workstations, or cloud workloads to the provider’s infrastructure.
• A web portal where you or your IT partner can see backup status and run restores.
• Features like de-duplication, compression, encryption, and sometimes immutability, depending on the vendor.

What you usually do not get by default is:

• Someone actively watching those backups for you.
• A documented recovery plan that spells out how to rebuild servers or bring applications back online.
• Regular test restores and written reports you can hand to an auditor.

For a small CPA or law firm that has an in-house IT admin or a very engaged IT consultant, BaaS can be a solid foundation. They can design the backup plan, set RPO and retention, handle monitoring, and execute restores when something goes wrong. But if no one is clearly accountable for those tasks, BaaS alone leaves a lot of work on the firm’s shoulders.

What is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)?

Disaster Recovery as a Service, or DRaaS, focuses on getting you working again quickly when your primary systems are unavailable. Where BaaS is mainly about safeguarding your data, DRaaS is about restoring your ability to operate.

In a DRaaS model, a provider typically:

• Continuously replicates your servers or virtual machines to a secondary site or their cloud.
• Keeps a recent, ready-to-boot copy of those systems so they can be started up on demand.
• Provides a tested runbook that describes how failover will work in a real incident.
• Helps you fail back to your primary environment once the underlying issue is resolved.

In practical terms for a firm:

• If a physical server in your office dies three weeks before April 15, DRaaS should allow your key workloads to be spun up in the provider’s environment within the agreed RTO, often a few hours.
• Your team connects to that temporary environment over secure remote access and continues working while hardware is repaired or cloud hosting is adjusted.

Without DRaaS, you are relying on a slower rebuild process:

• Restore backups to new hardware or virtual machines.
• Reconfigure applications, permissions, and integrations.
• Test everything under the pressure of a live outage.

DRaaS does not remove the need for backups. You still need “point in time” copies to protect against deletion, corruption, and ransomware. In most designs, DRaaS is layered on top of or alongside backup tooling so that you have both recent data and a place to run your systems if the primary environment is down.

Where do BCDR and high availability fit?

As you research BaaS and DRaaS, you will also see terms like business continuity, BCDR (Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery), and high availability. They describe related concepts, but they are not the same as managed backup, BaaS, or DRaaS.

• Backup is about creating usable copies of data.
• Disaster recovery (DR) is about restoring systems and services after an outage.
• Business continuity is the broader plan for keeping the firm functioning during and after incidents, including manual workarounds.
• BCDR is a shorthand for tying business continuity and disaster recovery into one strategy.
• High availability (HA) refers to architectures that avoid downtime through redundancy, such as clustered servers or load balanced applications.

For most small CPA and law firms:

• True high availability setups are often too expensive and complex compared to the risk profile.
• A realistic BCDR strategy is built from:
  • Well-designed backups, often delivered as managed backup or BaaS.
  • Practical DR capabilities, such as DRaaS for key workloads.
  • Clear RPO and RTO targets documented in your incident response and WISP.

Seen this way, managed backup, BaaS, and DRaaS are building blocks. The right combination for your firm depends on how much data you can afford to lose, how quickly you need to be up and running, and how much internal IT capacity you have to design, monitor, and test the entire backup and recovery process.

Managed Backup vs. BaaS vs. DRaaS: Key Differences

On paper, managed backup, BaaS, and DRaaS all sound like they “protect your data”. In reality, they solve different parts of the problem you just defined: avoiding data loss, controlling downtime, and proving to regulators and insurers that your plan works. If you mix them up, you either overspend or leave serious gaps.

The easiest way to see the difference is to look at who does what, and what happens on the worst day of the year for your firm.

Side by side comparison

Aspect	Managed backup	Backup as a Service (BaaS)	Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)
Primary Focus	End-to-end data protection and backup operations, including monitoring and testing	Storing backups safely offsite in the provider cloud	Getting full systems running again quickly after an outage
Who Manages Day-to-day	Provider designs strategy, monitors jobs, fixes failures, runs test restores	You or your IT partner design strategy, monitor jobs, and execute restores	Provider manages replication and failover, often with your IT involved in planning
Typical RPO You Can Achieve	Can be tailored per workload, for example hourly for tax and accounting systems in busy season	Depends how you configure BaaS, often daily by default unless IT tightens it	Depends on replication schedule, often minutes to a few hours for critical servers
Typical RTO You Can Achieve	Faster than DIY BaaS because restores and runbooks are pre-planned, still often hours	Usually longest, can be many hours or days to rebuild and validate systems	Shortest for protected systems, often measured in hours for a full failover
Compliance and Audit Support	Backup policy, logs, and test restore reports provided to support FTC, IRS, cyber insurance	Basic logs available, but you must pull, interpret, and document them yourself	Evidence of DR tests and failover exercises, combined with backup evidence if tightly linked
Fit for a 3 to 30-person Firm	Strong fit, especially if there is no in-house IT and partners want a single owner for backups	Only a fit if you already have capable IT or a very hands on MSP managing the setup	Strong fit when downtime tolerance is low and used together with managed backup or well run BaaS

Put simply:

• Managed backup gives you a specialist team that owns backup design, daily health, and test restores. It is about making sure backups actually work when needed, not just that they exist.
• BaaS gives you the tools and storage to back up data into the cloud, but it assumes someone on your side will take responsibility for planning and running recovery.
• DRaaS gives you a ready-to-use secondary environment so you can bring systems online quickly after a serious outage, usually on top of an existing backup setup.

For a typical CPA or law firm without in-house IT, the weak point is rarely the technology itself. It is the operational overhead of checking backup jobs, fixing failures, rehearsing recovery, and documenting everything for audits and cyber insurance. That is why many firms end up pairing DRaaS with a managed backup service instead of trying to glue BaaS and DRaaS together on their own.

A Quick Gut Check for Your Firm

If you are unsure where you stand today, ask three questions:

1. Who gets an alert if last night’s backups fail, and what do they actually do about it?
2. When was the last time you ran a full restore test for your key systems and documented the results?
3. If your main server died in March, how many hours until staff are working again on a known good copy of your environment?

If your answers are “I am not sure” or “our IT person would figure it out on the day”, then you are closer to having raw BaaS than a true managed backup plus DR strategy.

At this point in the article, it often makes sense for partners to get an outside view of their current setup. A focused managed backup and DR readiness review with a provider like Verito can map your actual RPO and RTO, highlight gaps in monitoring and testing, and show whether you are closer to a BaaS-only model or already partway toward managed backup and DRaaS. This kind of assessment is usually low friction and gives you a concrete baseline before you change anything.

Which do You Actually Need: A Decision Path for Small Firms

At this point, you know what managed backup, BaaS, and DRaaS are in theory. The harder part is deciding what your firm actually needs in practice.

For small CPA and law firms, the answer usually comes down to four questions:

1. How much downtime can you tolerate?
2. Who will manage everything day-to-day?
3. What regulators and insurers expect from you?
4. Where does your firm realistically fit?

Step 1: How much downtime can you tolerate?

Start with an honest look at how long you can be unable to work before you run into missed deadlines, penalties, or serious client issues.

Ask yourself:

• During tax season, how many hours of outage before you start missing filings or paying staff overtime just to catch up?
• For legal work, how long can you be without case management and documents before court dates or e-filing deadlines are at risk?

According to Verito Managed IT specialists, downtime can cost a three-person accounting business up to $350 per hour, which is 1.5 times more during tax season, according to client statistics. For larger businesses, the cost of downtime can climb steadily as the complexity and quantity of services involved rise. For example, an accounting business with five employees may lose between $1,500 and $2,250 each hour. Overtime and missed billable time are taken into account in this estimate. However, reputational harm to your company is another factor that is equally important but cannot be measured.

For a 10 to 20-person professional firm that lives and dies by billable hours, that kind of hit is significant.

Now link that to options:

• If you can live with 24 to 48 hours of downtime in a serious incident, plain BaaS with a good restore process might be sufficient.
• If more than 3 to 4 hours of outage during peak periods would materially damage your firm, you are in DRaaS territory, usually layered on top of managed backup.

A simple rule of thumb:

• Comfortable with restoring over a day or so: BaaS plus a well-written recovery plan can be enough, as long as someone owns it.
• Need to be back in hours, not days: You need DRaaS capabilities, and realistically you want a provider that also manages your backups.

Step 2: Who is Going to Manage This Every Week?

Technology alone does not keep backups healthy. Someone has to design the plan, monitor jobs, fix failures, run test restores, and keep documentation up-to-date.

Look at your actual situation:

• No in-house IT, just an external consultant you call when things break.
• One internal power user who likes technology but also has a full client workload.
• A small internal IT team that can plan and execute backup and DR.

For each scenario:

1. No In-house IT

• Expecting partners or a non-technical office manager to own BaaS configuration, monitoring, and recovery planning is risky.
• In this case, BaaS alone tends to degrade over time because no one is consistently checking failed jobs or running restore tests..
• Managed backup is usually the minimum here. DRaaS is added on top if your RTO expectations are tight.

2. One Internal Power User or a Part-time IT Consultant

• They can often keep BaaS working for a while, but testing DR and writing audit-ready documentation usually falls to the bottom of the list.
• Managed backup offloads the repetitive work of monitoring and testing so that internal capacity is used for higher value tasks.

3. Small Internal IT Team

• With enough time and expertise, they can build a robust BaaS plus DRaaS stack.
• Even here, many firms still buy managed backup and DRaaS because it is cheaper and less risky than having one or two internal people carry that responsibility alone.

If you cannot name a person or team that clearly owns backups and DR, and show how much time per week they spend on it, you are a strong candidate for managed backup rather than DIY BaaS.

Step 3: What do Regulators and Insurers Expect You to Prove?

CPA and law firms are not judged only on whether they have backups. They are judged on whether their backup and disaster recovery controls are appropriate, documented, and tested.

For US-based tax and accounting firms, that typically means:

• The FTC Safeguards Rule expects you to implement and test safeguards to protect customer information, which includes backup and recovery controls.
• IRS Publication 4557 calls out secure backup, disaster recovery planning, and incident response as part of protecting taxpayer data.

Cyber insurance questionnaires increasingly ask for:

• How often backups are taken and where they are stored.
• Whether backups are immutable or segmented from the production environment.
• Whether you perform and document periodic restore or DR tests.
• Whether BCDR is formally included in your written information security program (WISP).

Compare that to your options:

• Plain BaaS often gives you raw logs and status in a portal, but it is on you or your IT partner to extract, interpret, and package that as evidence for auditors and insurers.
• Managed backup typically includes documented policies, backup reports, and test restore results that can be attached directly to compliance files and insurance applications.
• DRaaS, when delivered as part of a managed service, usually includes DR test reports that show you have rehearsed failover, which is valuable for both regulators and insurers.

If you are already struggling to keep your WISP up-to-date, expecting your firm to also maintain backup and DR evidence manually on top of a “do it yourself” BaaS solution is often unrealistic.

Step 4: Match Your Firm to a Real World Scenario

To make this concrete, match your situation to one of these patterns.

Scenario 1: Solo or Micro CPA Firm

• 1 to 3 people, mix of QuickBooks Desktop, cloud tax software, and Office applications.
• Primarily single office or home-based, some seasonal staff.
• Can tolerate 24 hour RPO and a 1 to 2-day RTO outside of peak periods.

A simple BaaS solution, possibly combined with a light managed backup service, can be enough here. You still need clear instructions on how to restore and who to call when something breaks, but full DRaaS may not be cost-effective unless you are extremely deadline-driven.

Scenario 2: 15-person Tax and Accounting Firm, Multiple Offices

• Busy season includes evenings and weekends, heavy use of QuickBooks, tax suite, and document management.
• Downtime of more than a few hours in March or early April would create serious backlog and risk missed filings.
• Needs to answer detailed questions from cyber insurers about backup, recovery, and DR testing.

Here, a unified managed backup plus DRaaS approach is usually the right fit. You want:

• Hourly backups for key workloads in peak season.
• Application-aware backups for accounting and tax databases.
  
• DRaaS that can bring your main servers up in a provider environment within a few hours if the primary hosting layer fails.
• Regular restore and DR test documentation to attach to your WISP and insurance renewals.

Plain BaaS with ad-hoc IT support is unlikely to meet those expectations consistently.

Scenario 3: Small Litigation or Boutique Law Firm

• 10 to 20 staff, case management software, and document storage are central to operations.
• Court and filing deadlines leave very little room for extended downtime.
• Handles highly sensitive information that must remain available and confidential.

This profile looks a lot like the 15-person CPA firm in terms of risk. Managed backup and DRaaS for the core case management and file systems makes more sense than trying to string together BaaS and manual recovery steps. The firm gains clearer RPO and RTO commitments, tested failover, and documentation that partners can review in plain language.

Bringing the decision together

If you step back from the acronyms, the pattern is straightforward:

• If your firm can accept longer RTOs, has real IT capacity, and faces lighter compliance pressure, BaaS plus a well managed recovery plan can work.
• If you cannot clearly answer who owns backups and DR, how often they are tested, and how you would be working again within a few hours during peak periods, you are in managed backup plus DRaaS territory.

For most tax, accounting, and small law firms with 3 to 50-staff and little or no in-house IT, the safest and most realistic choice is:

• A managed backup service that includes cloud-based backups similar to BaaS.
• Combined with DRaaS for the critical systems that drive revenue and compliance.
• Delivered by a provider that understands professional firm workloads.

How to Evaluate Managed Backup, BaaS, and DRaaS Providers

Once you know roughly what you need, the next question is which provider you can trust to deliver it. For a CPA or law firm, this is less about brand names and more about whether a vendor can support specific RPO, RTO, security, and compliance needs without creating extra work for partners.

Use the criteria below when you assess any managed backup, BaaS, or DRaaS offering.

1. Start With the Non-negotiables

Regardless of the model, any backup and disaster recovery solution for an accounting or law firm should satisfy a few baseline requirements. Ask vendors for clear, written answers to these points.

1. RPO and RTO in Writing

You want more than marketing language about “fast recovery”. Insist on:

• Documented Recovery Point Objectives for your key systems, for example “hourly during tax season, every four hours off season”.
• Documented Recovery Time Objectives, for example “critical tax and accounting servers restored or failed over within four hours”.
• A clear scope statement, listing which systems the commitments apply to.

If a vendor will not put realistic RPO and RTO numbers in writing, you are effectively accepting “best effort” recovery.

2. Immutability and the 3-2-1-1 Rule

Ransomware groups now actively target backups. Various industry reports have found that the majority of successful ransomware incidents involve attempts to compromise or encrypt backup repositories, which is why security teams emphasize immutable and offsite copies rather than a single backup location.

Ask providers:

• Whether they support immutable backups that cannot be altered or deleted within a defined retention window.
• How they implement the 3-2-1-1-0 principle in practice: at least three copies of data, on two different media types, with one copy offsite, one preferably offline or logically separated, and with zero errors.
• Where backup data physically resides for your firm and how it is segregated from other customers.

If you hear only “we back up to the cloud” with no detail on immutability or separation, that is a red flag.

3. Encryption and Data Center Standards

You are dealing with tax returns, financial statements, trust documents, or case files. Any provider serving this space should be able to state plainly:

• Encryption in transit and at rest for all backups.
• Use of audited facilities such as SOC 2 Type II data centers.
• How encryption keys are managed and who can access what.

This is also the point where you align any provider’s approach with your written information security program (WISP). If you cannot describe their controls in that document, you will feel it at audit or claim time.

4. Documented Testing, Not Just “Theoretical” Recovery

A backup that has never been used in a restore is an untested assumption. When you evaluate backup and disaster recovery solutions, ask specifically:

• How often full restore tests are run for clients your size.
• Whether those tests include application-level verification, not just file restores.
• Whether you receive written test reports you can file for regulators and insurers

A serious managed backup or DRaaS provider will treat restore testing as part of the service, not an optional extra.

5. Extra Checks for Managed Backup Services

If you are looking at a managed backup service, you are paying for expertise and operational ownership. Validate that you are actually getting it.

Focus on these questions:

a. Who watches your backups every day

• Are backups monitored 24×7, or only during business hours.
• Who responds to failed backup jobs, and how quickly.
• Do you get notified only when there is already a problem, or when issues are detected and fixed.

b. How they tune backup schedules for your firm

• Can they increase frequency during tax season or major cases and relax it later.
• Do they differentiate between workloads, for example hourly for tax and accounting data, less often for archives.

c. Application awareness

• Do they have experience backing up QuickBooks, Lacerte, ProSeries, CCH, Thomson Reuters, or common legal case management tools.
• Do they support application-aware backups and consistent snapshots for databases, not just flat file copies.

d. Compliance alignment

• Can they provide sample reports or templates you can use for FTC Safeguards Rule documentation and IRS Publication 4557 requirements.
• Do they help you integrate backup and recovery into your WISP, or is that left entirely to you.

If the answers sound generic, you are likely dealing with a horizontal IT provider that does not fully understand professional firm workloads.

6. Extra Checks for BaaS Offerings

If you are considering Backup as a Service, assume that you or your IT partner will be doing more of the heavy lifting. The goal here is to make sure the platform is robust enough and that you can realistically operate it.

Key points to review:

a. Management interface and reporting

• Is the portal straightforward enough that your IT consultant or internal tech can quickly see failed jobs, storage consumption, and trends.
• Can you export logs and reports easily for audit and insurance purposes.

b. Recovery workflows

• How complex is it to restore an entire server or database.
• Are there clear runbooks or do you have to work it out mid-incident.

c. Scalability and retention

• Can you change retention policies per workload, for example longer retention for client documents than for test systems.
• How are costs structured for storage growth, and do costs stay predictable over time.

d. Integration with DRaaS

• If you later decide you need DRaaS, can it be layered cleanly on top of this BaaS platform.
• Will you be forced into a re-implementation, or can you reuse the same backups and policies.

BaaS can be a solid foundation, but if you do not have the time or skills to design and maintain recovery processes on top of it, you will end up with fragile protection.

7. Extra Checks for DRaaS Providers

Disaster Recovery as a Service is where many firms end up overpaying or under-specifying. A DRaaS provider can look impressive on paper, but you need to know exactly how failover will work for your systems.

Ask them to walk you through a concrete scenario, then clarify:

a. Failover process

• In a server failure three weeks before April 15, who declares a disaster, who initiates failover, and what sequence of steps follows.
• How staff will connect to the DR environment and whether you need additional VPN or remote desktop licensing.

b. Performance during failover

• Will the DR environment have enough compute and storage performance to support busy season workloads.
• Is performance guaranteed in the contract, or is it shared on a best-effort basis.

c. Failback plan

• Once your primary environment is healthy again, how do you move workloads back without losing data created in the DR environment.
• Who owns planning and executing that failback.
  

d. Testing frequency and scope

• How often full DR tests are run.
• Whether tests include your actual applications and user access.

DRaaS without clear answers to those points is little more than an expensive insurance policy that might not pay out as expected.

Use a Structured Checklist, Not Just a Sales Call

When partners evaluate providers ad-hoc, it is easy to miss critical questions or to accept vague answers under time pressure. A better approach is to use a structured BCDR checklist tailored to professional firms, then apply it consistently to every vendor.

For a firm in your position, that checklist should cover:

• RPO, RTO, and workload criticality
• Backup technology, schedules, immutability, and offsite strategy
• Monitoring, alerting, and human response
• Restore and DR testing cadence
• Compliance reporting and WISP alignment
• Contractual commitments and exit options

Why a Unified Managed Backup Plus DRaaS Approach Fits CPA and Law Firms

Once you work through RPO, RTO, and who will manage everything, a pattern emerges for most small and mid-sized CPA and law firms. You can certainly buy BaaS from one vendor, DRaaS from another, and bolt on some monitoring. In practice, though, that tends to create more complexity than it removes.

For firms that live on billable hours, tight deadlines, and sensitive client data, a unified approach where one provider delivers both managed backup and DRaaS usually fits better.

The Problem With Stitching BaaS and DRaaS Together Yourself

On paper, it seems flexible to pick a BaaS platform, choose a separate DRaaS provider, and then have your IT consultant connect the dots. In reality, that often introduces three types of risk.

1. Gaps Between Backup and Recovery Design

If one vendor focuses on BaaS and another on DRaaS, there is a real chance that:

• Backup schedules are set without considering how DR replication works.
• DR failover plans assume fresh data that backups are not actually providing.
• Retention policies for backups and DR copies are not aligned.

These gaps only become visible when you are already in an outage and partners are asking why some work is missing or why a system cannot be started in the DR environment.

2. Finger Pointing During Incidents

When something goes wrong, even good vendors can start blaming each other:

• The BaaS provider says all backups are successful and points to logs.
• The DRaaS provider says the replicated image is not booting correctly because of how the backups were taken.
• Your IT consultant is stuck in the middle while the firm is down.

From a partner’s perspective, this is the worst possible time to discover that “responsibility” was shared but never clearly owned.

3. More Operational Overhead for a Non-technical Firm

Even when the technology works, splitting responsibilities across vendors increases day-to-day work:

• Two or more portals to monitor.
• Two different support processes and escalation paths.
• More documentation to maintain in your WISP and compliance files.

For a 10 to 30-person firm without in-house IT, that overhead usually lands on a managing partner, office manager, or external consultant, none of whom have spare capacity during peak periods.

Benefits of One Provider Handling Managed Backup and DRaaS

With a unified provider, the same team is responsible for backup design, daily monitoring, and disaster recovery planning. That has concrete advantages for a small professional firm.

1. Aligned RPO and RTO, End-to-end

• The provider designs backup schedules, replication settings, and DR runbooks as a single system.
• RPO and RTO commitments are based on tested scenarios, not assumptions.
• Changes in one layer, such as a new critical application, are reflected across backup and DR planning.

You avoid surprises like discovering that a new database is included in backups but not in failover plans, or vice versa.

2. One Group to Call on the Worst Day of the Year

In a unified model:

• You have a single emergency number and escalation path.
• The team that responds already knows your environment, backups, and DR plans.
• There is no confusion over whether an incident is a “backup issue” or a “DR issue”.

From a partner’s perspective, this simplicity is valuable. When systems are down near a filing or court deadline, you need someone who can both diagnose and fix the problem.

3. Stronger Compliance and Cyber Insurance Posture

A provider that delivers both managed backup and DRaaS can usually give you:

• A single set of policies and diagrams that explain backup and DR in terms that non-technical reviewers can understand.
• Combined reports showing both restore tests and DR drills, which align well with expectations under FTC Safeguards and IRS guidance.
• Easier responses to cyber insurance questionnaires, since one provider can answer most of the technical items.

Instead of compiling evidence from multiple portals and vendors, you can attach a concise packet of backup and DR documentation to your WISP and renewal applications.

4. More Predictable Costs

When one provider owns the full picture:

• You can size backup, storage, and DR resources based on realistic usage, rather than overbuying each piece in isolation.
• You have a clearer sense of what is included in the monthly fee and what would count as an exception during a major incident.
• You reduce the risk of surprise invoices from multiple vendors during and after a disaster recovery event.

For many firms, that predictability matters as much as the underlying technology.

Where This Leaves Most CPA and Law Firms

If you revisit the scenarios from earlier:

• The solo or micro firm may be fine with a simpler BaaS setup or light managed backup, run by a trusted consultant.
• As soon as you reach the point where multiple staff rely on shared systems all day, where downtime during peak periods is unacceptable, and where regulators and insurers are asking detailed questions, the balance shifts.

At that point, a unified managed backup plus DRaaS approach, delivered by a provider that understands accounting and legal workloads, is usually the most practical choice. It trades some theoretical flexibility for:

• Clear ownership
• Tested recovery paths
• Better alignment with compliance and insurance expectations

That is exactly the combination many tax, accounting, and law firms are now looking for when they go back to the market for backup and disaster recovery.

As you start comparing specific providers, it can be useful to see what a unified approach looks like in practice.

Verito’s Approach to Managed Backup and DR for Professional Firms

To make the ideas concrete, it helps to see how a specialist provider puts them into practice for firms like yours. Verito focuses on tax, accounting, and similar compliance-driven practices, which means backup, disaster recovery, and security are designed around your deadlines and regulatory obligations.

How Verito Structures Managed Backup for CPA and Law Firms

Verito’s managed backup services are built for firms that cannot afford data loss or long downtime but do not have in-house IT to manage everything.

In a typical engagement for a 10 to 30-person firm, Verito will:

• Map critical workloads such as QuickBooks, tax applications, case management, and file servers, then set RPO and RTO targets that reflect busy season or court calendars.
  
• Configure application-aware backups with higher frequency for core systems during peak periods, for example hourly backups for tax and accounting workloads in March and early April.
  
• Maintain encrypted, offsite backup copies in audited data centers, with immutability options to protect against ransomware tampering.
  
• Run regular restore tests, including application-level verification, and provide reports that can go straight into your WISP, FTC Safeguards, and IRS Publication 4557 documentation.

You should be able to answer questions like “How far back can we restore?” and “How long until we are working again?” with clear numbers, backed by logs and test reports, not guesswork.

DRaaS as Part of a Unified Hosting and Recovery Stack

On the disaster recovery side, Verito operates environments that can host your key applications and data, not just store backups. That is where DRaaS comes in.

For firms hosted on Verito infrastructure, critical workloads can be replicated and brought online in Verito’s environment if the primary servers fail. In practice, that means:

• If an on-premise server dies or a primary hosting layer experiences a serious issue, Verito can fail over protected workloads to a secondary environment so staff can continue working.
• RTO targets are defined in advance and tuned for tax season or key litigation windows.
• Failover and failback procedures are tested, not just documented.

This DRaaS capability pairs naturally with managed backup. The same team that designs and monitors your backups is responsible for planning and executing failover. You are not trying to coordinate between a generic BaaS vendor, a separate DRaaS provider, and a third-party consultant during an outage.

For firms that want a single provider for everything, Verito’s broader stack matters:

• VeritSpace provides dedicated private servers for accounting and tax software, so your production environment and DR environment are built on the same high performance platform.
• VeritGuard delivers 24/7 managed IT services with monitoring, patching, endpoint protection, and security controls wrapped around your backup and DR posture.
• VeritComplete is a combined cloud hosting and managed IT bundle, so hosting, backups, DR, and day-to-day IT support come from one team that understands your firm

Taken together, this gives partners one accountable provider for uptime, data protection, and support.

Compliance, WISP Support, and Proof

Because Verito focuses on regulated professional firms, the managed backup and DR offering is designed to feed directly into compliance and cyber insurance workflows.

In practice, that means:

• Backup, DR, and security controls can be described clearly in your WISP, with diagrams and narratives that non-technical reviewers can follow.
• Test restore and DR drill reports are available to show that controls are not just on paper but exercised on a schedule.
• VeritShield WISP services can help you align your written policies with reality, including how your backup and disaster recovery plan satisfies FTC Safeguards Rule and IRS Publication 4557 expectations

A Practical Next Step With Verito

If this guide has clarified that you are closer to “we have some backups somewhere” than to a tested managed backup plus DR strategy, the logical next step is a focused assessment.

Verito offers a managed backup and DR readiness demo where their team reviews your current setup, maps realistic RPO and RTO for your key workloads, and recommends whether you can get by with simpler backups or need unified managed backup plus DRaaS.

Choosing Managed Backup, BaaS, or DRaaS with Confidence

Managed backup, BaaS, and DRaaS are not marketing labels for the same thing. They represent different levels of responsibility and different outcomes when something breaks at the worst possible time.

For a small or mid-sized CPA or law firm, the real decision is not which acronym sounds modern. It is how much data you can afford to lose, how long you can be down before deadlines and clients are at risk, and who will own the day-to-day work of keeping backups and disaster recovery plans usable.

Used on its own, BaaS solves the storage problem, not the operations problem. It puts your data in the cloud but still expects someone on your side to design, monitor, test, and document everything. DRaaS brings a secondary environment online fast, but it still depends on good backups underneath. Managed backup wraps operational ownership around those tools so you are not improvising during an outage.

If your current answer to “How long could we really be down in March?” or “When did we last test a full restore?” is vague, this is the point to act, not after an incident.

The next step is to book an assessment with a provider like Verito. You get a clear picture of your actual RPO and RTO, a list of gaps, and a concrete recommendation on whether plain BaaS is enough or a unified managed backup plus DRaaS approach is warranted. From there, you can decide with facts instead of assumptions.

---

FAQ:

---

tl;dr

• A focused managed backup and DR readiness review with a specialist provider like Verito is a practical next step to benchmark your current setup and decide whether you can stay with BaaS or need managed backup plus DRaaS.
• Managed backup, BaaS, and DRaaS are different services, not interchangeable labels.
• BaaS mainly provides cloud backup tools and storage, leaving design, monitoring, and testing to you or your IT partner.
• Managed backup adds ongoing human ownership of backup strategy, daily monitoring, issue remediation, and restore testing.
• DRaaS provides a secondary environment where your systems can be brought online quickly if the primary environment fails.
• Your choice should be driven by how much data you can afford to lose (RPO) and how long you can be down before deadlines and clients are at risk (RTO).
• BaaS alone is only realistic when you already have capable IT resources to design, operate, and document backup and disaster recovery.
• Most CPA and law firms with 3 to 50 staff, limited internal IT, and tight tax or court deadlines are better served by a unified managed backup plus DRaaS solution.
• Modern ransomware frequently targets backup storage, which makes immutable backups, offsite copies, and regular restore testing essential.
• FTC Safeguards, IRS Publication 4557, and cyber insurers expect documented, tested backup and DR processes that tie into your written information security program.