A backup file sitting in storage does not help much if rebuilding a server takes six hours. That is the gap Nexcess is working to close. The managed cloud provider rolled out a new disaster recovery service this week, extending its existing Acronis-powered backup product with something backups on their own cannot deliver: a live, bootable mirror of a customer’s server, already spinning and ready in the cloud.
The numbers matter here. Nexcess is promising a one-hour Recovery Time Objective, meaning a business could theoretically come back online within an hour of a failure instead of the half-day-plus a traditional restore-from-snapshot process often demands. Provisioning kicks in automatically on a pre-configured network. Test failovers run on their own too, so customers get actual proof the system works rather than a promise it will when something eventually breaks.
Most small and midsize businesses skip disaster recovery entirely, and the reasons are easy to understand. The traditional setup requires a second physical site, a replication stack running around the clock, and someone whose job revolves around babysitting all of it. Nexcess is betting that complexity, more than cost, is what has kept smaller businesses away from real DR. Its version runs through a single agent, and customers already backing up through Nexcess already have that agent in place, so nothing new needs deploying.
“A backup protects your data. Disaster recovery protects your business,” said Michael Ohayon, Nexcess’s general manager for managed cloud. He noted that most companies discover the difference the hard way, usually in the middle of a ransomware attack or right after a hardware failure, suddenly facing a restore process that will burn hours they simply do not have. The aim, he explained, was keeping a server no more than a button click away from coming back online, with confirmation of that already in place long before anyone needs to use it.
Ransomware keeps climbing. Hardware still fails. Compliance reviews keep asking harder questions. Together, all three are nudging smaller businesses toward a realization many have not reached yet: nightly backups protect files, but they do not protect uptime. When something goes wrong, rebuilding from a snapshot burns time nobody budgeted for, and that time costs real revenue.
The disaster recovery service goes live September 14, 2026. Current Nexcess backup customers can layer it on top of what they already have, and new customers can fold it straight into a managed cloud plan from day one.
