Local vs. Cloud Backup: Why MSPs Need Both for True Disaster Recovery

The Speed Advantage of Local

When disaster strikes, speed matters. And nothing beats local backup for recovery speed.

If your client loses a VM or a host—and the building is still standing—local backup gets them back up in minutes. Not hours. Not days. Minutes.

There's another advantage MSPs often overlook: simplicity. With local recovery, you don't have to reconfigure the network. You don't have to reroute traffic or deal with connectivity complications. You restore and go.

For the everyday disasters—hardware failures, accidental deletions, a single corrupted VM—local is the fastest path back to normal operations.

When Local Isn't Enough

But what happens when the building does burn down? Or floods? Or loses power for weeks?

What happens when ransomware encrypts the entire network—including the local backup infrastructure?

This is where cloud becomes essential. Not just cloud storage, but cloud with true disaster recovery as a service.

Here's the distinction that matters: if your backups are only stored in the cloud, you're waiting forever to download that data before you can do anything with it. That's not DR. That's a bottleneck.

True cloud DR means you can spin up operations in the cloud while the client's physical environment is compromised or inaccessible.

The Worst-Case Scenario Most MSPs Don't Plan For

Consider this scenario: the MSP itself gets encrypted. The attacker came through your own RMM, and now every client connected to your systems is compromised simultaneously.

Every device. Every client. All at once.

This isn't theoretical. It's happened.

In that moment, you need the ability to boot up any client—and as many clients as you need—in data centers that are geographically separated from your primary environment. You need those backups to be immutable, meaning attackers can't modify or delete them even if they have your credentials.

And you need to know it will work because you've tested it.

Local backup alone can't save you here. You need cloud infrastructure that's isolated, immutable, and ready to run—not just store—your clients' operations.

The Complete Picture

The question isn't local vs. cloud. It's whether you have the right tool for each scenario:

• Local for speed and simplicity when the physical environment is intact
• Cloud for resilience when everything on-site is compromised or inaccessible

You need both. And on the cloud side, you need more than storage—you need compute, geographic separation, immutability, and the ability to actually run DR when the worst happens.

How Servosity Delivers This Model

Servosity was built around this exact philosophy: local speed combined with cloud resilience.

Your backups live on-site for fast recovery from everyday incidents. Simultaneously, they're replicated to multiple geographically separated data centers with both storage and compute—so if you need to run DR as a service, the infrastructure is already there.

Every backup is immutable and tested, so when the worst-case scenario hits, you're not wondering if recovery will work. You already know.