The days of simple backups being sufficient for business security are long gone. While backups store information, they do not guarantee business continuity during crises. With IT disasters becoming increasingly common and downtime depleting budgets, modern IT environments require solutions that exceed storage and enable instant recovery to minimize downtime and data loss. This is where Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) comes into play. BCDR goes beyond basic backup to provide comprehensive recovery that keeps businesses running, regardless of the challenges they face.

Notably, the shift towards BCDR has become a critical focus area for businesses worldwide. The State of BCDR Report 2025, which surveyed over 3,000 IT professionals, decision-makers, and experts, reveals that more than half of organizations plan to switch their backup solutions within the next year. Apart from the obvious cost concerns, businesses cite disaster recovery (DR) execution and the ability to effectively test backup and recovery processes as the key factors driving this change.

On this front, Datto BCDR is an all-in-one hybrid cloud BCDR platform that guarantees business continuity and resilience without breaking the bank. Datto BCDR seamlessly integrates local hardware, software, and cloud-based recovery to keep businesses up and running. Remarkably, this comprehensive approach allows organizations to consolidate their backup and DR needs under a single, reliable vendor, significantly reducing costs.

Can a single solution transform the way businesses recover from disasters? Scott Lennon, CEO of Total Communications, thinks so. He describes Datto’s backup appliance SIRIS as “a magical IT box” due to its powerful local and cloud virtualization capabilities. Read the full case study here.

Let’s examine how Datto BCDR works to facilitate effortless business continuity.

How Datto BCDR Delivers Turnkey Business Continuity

Datto BCDR is a comprehensive, turnkey BCDR platform designed to always keep businesses operational. At its core, Datto BCDR combines a robust lineup of backup appliances with both agent-based and agentless backups, ensuring flexibility across different IT environments. The purpose-built Datto Cloud powers the hybrid disaster recovery capabilities of this platform, designed specifically for long-term, off-site data retention and disaster recovery.

1) Seamless Deployment Across Physical, Virtual, and Image-Based Environments

Datto appliances are built for quick, scalable, and flexible data protection. They offer options for turnkey physical appliances as well as virtual and image-based deployments. Regardless of the deployment type, every solution includes cloud replicas for long-term data retention, off-site redundancy, DR testing, and full DR capabilities. Datto SIRIS Private offers a simple way to deploy Datto devices as a private cloud for customers, commonly used in industries like healthcare, financial services, and government.

A key advantage of a Datto appliance is that it doubles as a local recovery target, hosting workloads and applications in the event of a local failover. This ensures fast recovery on-site while maintaining automated, hourly replication to the immutable Datto Cloud for off-site protection.

2) Flexible Backup Options with Agent-Based and Agentless Protection

Datto BCDR supports both agent-based and agentless backups, giving businesses the flexibility to protect their systems based on their infrastructure. While agent-based backups are available for Windows and Linux, agentless backups for VMware virtual machines (VMs) eliminate the need to manage and update agents. With these options, businesses can implement a backup strategy that aligns with their IT setup, whether it consists of physical servers, virtual machines, or a combination of both.

3) Customizable Backup and Replication Schedules

Datto BCDR gives businesses full control over their backup and replication schedules, ensuring that data is always protected without requiring constant manual intervention. Once admins define their local and cloud backup policies, they do not need to configure or manage the cloud environment, making the process simple and efficient.

For greater control, backup and replication policies can be fine-tuned, allowing IT teams to adjust backup frequency, retention settings, and alert preferences. Additional options like off-site sync throttling and manual backups are available so that backup operations don’t interfere with network performance or business operations. Datto also offers advanced verification and DR testing features to ensure that backups are healthy and recoverable. Meanwhile, Datto’s robust reporting and alerting capabilities enable IT teams to customize notifications, reports, and monitoring settings, ensuring full visibility and proactive issue resolution.

Gain Next-Level Efficiency with Datto’s Inverse Chain Technology

Datto’s Inverse Chain Technology is designed to outperform traditional incremental backups that rely on a chain structure, where a full backup is followed by incremental backups that only capture changes. While this reduces processing power during backups, recovery is slow because the system must rebuild a full backup from multiple incremental copies. Worse, if a single incremental backup is corrupt, all subsequent recovery points become unusable.

Inverse Chain Technology solves these problems by storing each backup as a fully independent recovery point, eliminating the need for a rebuild process. Each backup creates a complete server image, including data, applications, operating system, and settings, ensuring faster and more reliable restores both locally and in the Datto Cloud. Despite storing full recovery points, storage demands stay low thanks to ZFS copy-on-write technology, which ensures each unique data block is saved only once. IT teams can also delete outdated or unusual recovery points without resetting


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