The 5 Pains of DIY Disaster Recovery (And How DRaaS Fixes Them)

Part 1 of 2: Why building your own DR environment costs more than you think

Whether you’re an MSP delivering disaster recovery (DR) to clients or an in-house IT team protecting your own business, the question is the same: build DR yourself, or use a service designed for the job?

DIY disaster recovery is a legitimate choice. Some teams have the infrastructure, the expertise, and the bandwidth to build and run their own DR environment. But for most MSPs and mid-market IT teams, the honest reality is that self-managed DR is operationally heavy, difficult to test consistently, and expensive to maintain whether you’re scaling across clients or stretching a lean IT team to cover more workloads.

This post breaks down five specific pain points that come with DIY disaster recovery—and explains how Cove DRaaS from N‑able is designed to address each one. If you’re currently evaluating whether to build or buy, this is a useful place to start.

Pain 1: DIY DR Infrastructure is Complex to Build and Maintain

Building a DR environment from scratch means designing and provisioning your own secondary infrastructure—servers, storage, networking, and the configurations that tie it all together. That’s a significant upfront investment, but the real cost is what comes after.

You need to harden that infrastructure against threats, keep it up to date, and ensure it stays compliant with relevant frameworks and requirements. Every time your production environment changes, your DR environment needs to reflect that. And if something breaks, it’s your team’s problem to fix.

Most IT teams simply do not have the personnel bandwidth or specialized expertise to design, operate, and continuously manage disaster recovery environments — leaving gaps that only surface when disaster strikes. For many MSPs, this isn’t a one-client problem—it’s multiplied across dozens of clients, each with different workloads and recovery requirements.

How Cove DRaaS addresses this: Cove delivers DR through a secure, managed cloud environment. The infrastructure is built, hardened, and maintained by N‑able. MSPs can onboard and protect new clients without replicating infrastructure for each one. IT teams get enterprise-grade DR without needing specialized staff to build or maintain it

Pain 2: Unpredictable Costs That Are Hard to Plan Around

DIY DR has a cost structure that can be difficult to forecast. Hardware has a lifespan. Cloud consumption costs fluctuate with usage spikes and storage growth.

Storage scales unpredictably. And every test, every failover, every upgrade adds to the bill in ways that aren’t always visible until after the fact.

Self-managed disaster recovery forces IT teams to constantly calculate and justify costs, turning recovery into a budget challenge as much as a technical one.

For MSPs, trying to package DR as a service offering, unpredictable costs create a real pricing problem. If your own costs aren’t stable, building a profitable, consistently priced service tier becomes much harder.

How Cove DRaaS addresses this: Cove uses a flat per-device subscription model. You know what you’re paying, you know what it covers, and you’re not hit with surprise bills when you run a recovery test or fail over a workload. That predictability makes it easier to build DR into a managed service package, price it accurately for clients, and protect your margins.

Pain 3: Recovery Testing in Self-Managed DR Environments Rarely Happens

Testing is where most DIY DR environments fail and the data backs it up. According to Gitnux Report 2026, 67% of organizations cannot consistently meet their recovery targets, often because testing is insufficient or nonexistent.

The intention to test regularly is almost universal. The actual execution? Much less so.

Testing a DR environment is disruptive, time-consuming, and technically complex when done manually. It often requires coordination across multiple teams, careful scheduling to avoid production impact, and significant documentation to prove recoverability. For a lean IT team, finding a maintenance window and pulling staff off day-to-day operations to run a meaningful DR test is a hard trade-off.

For a busy MSP managing multiple clients, quarterly testing across every protected workload isn’t realistic without the right tools.

The result: recovery plans that look solid on paper but haven’t been validated in months—or ever. When a real incident hits, you find out whether your plan works — and that’s the worst possible time to discover it doesn’t.

How Cove DRaaS addresses this: Automated recovery testing is built directly into Cove DRaaS. Tests run automatically to verify recoverability before disaster strikes, so you’re not relying on manual processes or hoping someone found time last quarter. You get documented proof that recovery works—without the disruption of running tests manually. For MSPs, that means proving recoverability across every client without dedicating technician time. For IT teams, it means audit-ready evidence delivered automatically — no downtime windows, no justification required.

Pain 4: Failover and Networking Are Harder Than They Look

Even teams that invested in DR infrastructure often hit a wall when it comes to networking. Failing over workloads to a secondary environment requires careful IP address management, VPN configuration, and routing changes that, if done incorrectly, can leave systems unreachable or create security gaps.

For an IT team without deep networking expertise, this is where recovery plans stall — the person running the failover may not be the person who configured the network. For MSPs, the expertise may exist but it doesn’t scale — when multiple clients need failover at the same time, your senior network engineer becomes a bottleneck.

And in both cases, pressure is exactly what you’re under when a real disaster is in progress.

The result: failover processes that work in theory but fall apart in execution — precisely when speed and accuracy matter most. A failed failover doesn’t just delay recovery; it can extend downtime, expose data, or force a full rebuild.

How Cove DRaaS addresses this: Cove provides guided VPN and failover workflows with best-practice defaults that reduce complexity and make it possible to execute recovery without deep cloud networking expertise. When a real event happens, the path forward is guided—not improvised.

Pain 5: The Management Burden of DIY Disaster Recovery Never Shrinks

DIY DR doesn’t have a finish line. You don’t build it once and move on. You monitor it, patch it, update it, test it, and adapt it as workloads change. You manage the security posture. You handle compliance documentation. You field calls when something isn’t working as expected.

For MSPs trying to grow their client base, that ongoing overhead represents real capacity that could be spent elsewhere. And for mid-market IT teams, it can mean DR becomes a task that’s permanently sitting at the bottom of the queue.

How Cove DRaaS addresses this: Cove DRaaS is co-managed. N‑able manages and secures the DR infrastructure, while you manage backups, VM configuration, and testing schedules. A team of disaster recovery experts is available 24/7 to assist with DR scenarios, and a dedicated Critical Restore hotline ensures you’re not on your own when a real incident occurs. You reduce the management surface without giving up control — whether you’re configuring DR for multiple clients or protecting your own business-critical systems.

DRaaS vs. DIY Disaster Recovery: Which Path Makes More Sense?

DIY DR is viable—but It’s costly. None of this is to say that building your own disaster recovery environment is always the wrong choice.

It’s a viable path for teams with the right resources and expertise. But it comes with real, ongoing costs that are easy to underestimate in the planning phase and difficult to reduce once the infrastructure is in place.

For MSPs, that means a DR offering you can scale profitably without scaling your operations team. For IT teams, it means enterprise-grade disaster recovery without the expertise gap or management burden. In both cases, Cove DRaaS offers a more practical path — one that’s built around how modern teams actually work.

Coming Up Next

This is part one of a two-part series on Cove DRaaS. In the next post, we’ll take a closer look at how Cove DRaaS works in practice—from initial setup and workload configuration to what co-managed recovery actually looks like when a real disaster strikes. If you’re ready to explore Cove DRaaS now, you can sign up for early access to the preview program at n-able.com/cove-draas.