Product Walkthrough: How Datto BCDR Delivers Unstoppable Business Continuity

Long gone are the days when a simple backup in a data center was enough to keep a business secure. While backups store information, they do not guarantee business continuity during a crisis. With IT disasters far too common and downtime burning through budgets, modern IT environments require solutions that go beyond 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, no matter what comes their way.

Notably, the shift toward BCDR has become a critical focus area for businesses worldwide. The State of BCDR Report 2025, which surveyed over 3,000 IT pros, 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 concern, businesses cite disaster recovery (DR) execution and the ability to effectively test backup and recovery processes as the key factors driving this change.

On that 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 calls Datto’s backup appliance SIRIS “a magical IT box” for its powerful local and cloud virtualization. Read the full case study here.

Let’s check 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. Powering the hybrid disaster recovery capabilities of this platform is the purpose-built Datto Cloud, 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 your customers, which is 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 since it can host 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. For those who require an even more granular approach, Datto offers more advanced options that allow IT teams to fine-tune their backup and DR settings to match their unique business requirements.

Gain next-level efficiency with Datto’s Inverse Chain Technology™

Datto’s Inverse Chain Technology™ is designed to outperform the popular 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 the backup chain, such as removing backups of a machine confirmed infected with ransomware.

With backups as frequent as every five minutes, the technology ensures minimal data loss. It also drastically reduces the management overhead by eliminating frequent full backups and manual pruning.

Experience the power of the immutable Datto Cloud

The Datto Cloud is purpose-built for cloud backup and DR, offering unmatched flexibility, security, performance and cost-efficiency.

With Datto Cloud, you get:

• Cloud Deletion Defense™: Recover agents or backup snapshots, whether accidentally or maliciously deleted.
• Geo-distributed protection: Store data in multiple geographic locations for redundancy and compliance.
• Enterprise-grade security: AES-256 encryption (at rest and in transit), two-factor authentication (2FA) and immutable storage to prevent unauthorized access and data tampering.
• Proven reliability: A platform that handles 10,000+ restores per month, supporting over one million end clients.
• Transparent pricing: No hidden fees or surprise costs, such as hidden egress fees and unpredictable storage costs.

Be 100% confident in your backup and recovery

Backup and DR verification are critical to ensuring 100% recoverability, yet many businesses fail to test their backups frequently enough. According to the State of BCDR Report 2025, testing often takes a back seat due to limited IT staff and time constraints. The report found that only 15% of organizations test backups daily, and 25% conduct tests weekly, suggesting that the remaining operate with an uncertain level of risk. DR testing follows a similar pattern, with just 11% testing daily, 20% weekly and 23% monthly. The rest are extremely vulnerable to prolonged, unexpected outages.

With Datto BCDR, backup and DR testing are fully automated, eliminating the manual effort required for routine verification.

With Datto’s automated backup and DR testing, you get:

• Screenshot verification: Confirm that backups boot and restore successfully.
• Application verification: Ensure that critical application services like Structured Query Language (SQL), Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), Active Directory (AD) and Domain Name System (DNS) start correctly after recovery.
• Service verification: Confirm that additional system services start upon boot, including:
  • Security services (Windows Firewall, Windows Defender, etc.)
  • Networking configurations and services
  • Remote Desktop settings and access
• Ransomware detection: Get backups scanned for suspicious file patterns, alerting IT teams to potential ransomware activity before it spreads.

Leverage the unparalleled recovery capabilities of Datto BCDR

A backup is only as good as its ability to restore data quickly and reliably when disaster strikes. Datto BCDR provides all the necessary tools to restore operations seamlessly, ensuring business continuity with minimal disruption.

Seamless local recovery for instant failover

Get powerful features for swift local recovery, including:

• Local virtualization: Datto appliances double as local recovery targets, allowing businesses to host workloads and applications directly on the device. In the event of a hardware failure, software crash or ransomware attack, where recovery to production is not immediately possible, businesses can failover to the Datto appliance and continue operations without disruption.
• Export backup images, including in RAW format: The Export Image function supports export to VMDK, VHD and VHDX formats and offers native RAW export for Linux-based hypervisors, including Proxmox, SCALE Computing Platform and OpenStack. This eliminates the need for manual image conversions, reducing recovery time and complexity.
• Additional recovery options: Datto BCDR provides granular and full-system recovery capabilities, including file and folder restore, volume restore, virtualization via hypervisor, bare metal restore and ESX upload. These options give IT teams the flexibility to restore data in the way that best suits their needs.

Effortless cloud recovery with the Datto Recovery Launchpad

What sets Datto apart is its purpose-built disaster recovery cloud, designed for fast, reliable and hassle-free recovery. The Datto Cloud provides self-service cloud recovery tools through the Recovery Launchpad, ensuring IT teams can restore systems quickly when local recovery is not an option. Accessible from the same portal used to manage Datto BCDR appliances, the Recovery Launchpad delivers a seamless, centralized experience.

IT pros can leverage a comprehensive set of tools here to restore data quickly and efficiently. If they need to recover specific files or folders, they can download them instantly using File Restore. In the event of a major disruption, they can spin up full backups in the Datto Cloud through instant virtualization. For more extensive recovery needs, Image Export allows them to retrieve complete recovery points from cloud backups.

Lightning-fast recovery with Datto’s 1-Click Disaster Recovery

Datto’s groundbreaking 1-Click Disaster Recovery (1-Click DR) feature makes disaster recovery fast, effortless and reliable — as simple as reordering from your favorite fast-food app. This feature allows IT pros to clone virtual machines (VM) and network configurations from previously successful DR tests, eliminating the need to manually reconfigure settings during an actual disaster. By reapplying tested configurations, businesses can drastically reduce recovery times and minimize the risk of DR failures, ensuring they meet even the strictest recovery time objectives (RTOs) with ease.

Final thoughts

A strong BCDR strategy is critical for protecting businesses from unexpected disruptions. From securing backups against cyberthreats and validating their integrity to regularly testing recovery processes and executing DR with precision, each step plays a crucial role in ensuring seamless operations. Without the right solution, businesses risk costly downtime, critical data loss and catastrophic financial and reputational setbacks.

To avoid such repercussions, businesses can confidently trust Datto, which continues to set the benchmark in business continuity and resilience. With Datto’s peerless capabilities, IT pros and businesses can rest assured that their operations remain protected, recoverable and uninterrupted, no matter what challenges arise.

Ready to solidify your business resilience? Get custom Datto BCDR pricing now.

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