Key Takeaways
- Wildfire risk now extends beyond the fire itself to the infrastructure businesses depend on every day.
- Modern disaster recovery (DR) is about maintaining business operations, not simply recovering data.
- Expedient Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) helps organizations maintain access to critical applications and data when local infrastructure is disrupted.
Natural Disasters Are Unpredictable. Being Prepared Shouldn’t Be.
Natural disasters don’t look the same from one region to the next or even from one year to the next. Wildfires, tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, and winter storms each bring unique challenges, but they all have one thing in common: they can disrupt business in ways that extend far beyond damaged buildings or lost power.
Today’s organizations face a new reality. Recovery is about many things, including restoring systems after a disaster, maintaining business continuity when employees can’t reach the office, dealing with interrupted supply chains and provider obstacles, and operating when an entire affected region is under stress.
In our new blog series about natural disaster preparedness, we’ll explore six of the most common natural disasters affecting businesses today. This article looks at wildfires, the unique challenges they create, and what organizations can do to strengthen resilience before the next wildfire occurs. Because while every disaster is different, preparedness is always the best place to start.
Your business can be affected by a wildfire’s impact even if your facilities aren’t in the direct path. Operations quickly come to a standstill when you’re faced with evacuation orders, power shutoffs, damaged infrastructure, and internet outages. That’s why modern disaster recovery (DR) is about more than protecting a data center or restoring backups. It’s about keeping your business running when the infrastructure around you fails.
Teams that navigate wildfire season successfully prepare for much more than fire.
Wildfires Are Changing the Risk Landscape
Today, critical applications, cloud services, communications, and internet connectivity all depend on infrastructure that extends well beyond the office, making wildfires a business continuity challenge even when the building is untouched.
The numbers tell the story:
Critical infrastructure: Wildfires damage transmission lines, substations, and communications infrastructure, causing cascading disruptions that extend well beyond the fire zone.1
Power grid reliability: Utilities now view wildfires as a growing grid reliability challenge because they affect power availability and overall grid operations.2
Data center capacity: 79% of global data center capacity is facing increased risk from wildfires and other climate hazards.3
The Cost of Disruption
The business impact of wildfires goes beyond property damage.
Even if your building is safe, the cost of disruptions from employee evacuations to Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS) adds up. NOAA estimates that wildfires cost the U.S. approximately $424 billion annually through emergency response, infrastructure damage, business interruption, healthcare, and recovery.4 At an average cost of $15,000 per minute of downtime, even a short disruption can have significant financial consequences.5
What Good DR Looks Like
A modern DR strategy asks the question: How do we keep the business operating if our employees can’t access the office or log in to critical systems? Organizations that make it through wildfire season with minimal disruption typically have a disaster recovery strategy that looks like this:
Recovery doesn’t depend on human intervention. Automated failover can be initiated remotely, even if the office is closed or the surrounding area is inaccessible.
Recovery capacity already exists. There’s no waiting for replacement servers or hardware after a disaster because the recovery environment is already in place.
Critical workloads are continuously replicated. Data and applications remain synchronized in a geographically separate recovery environment, helping organizations meet Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) while enabling critical systems to come online quickly and support Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs).
Recovery happens outside the affected area. Recovery infrastructure runs on independent power and in a different geographic area, reducing the impact of local or regional disruptions.
Recovery has been tested. Recovery objectives aren’t theoretical. They’ve been validated through regular testing so everyone knows what to expect.
Security and compliance are built in. Data remains protected with the controls, encryption, and governance needed to meet industry and regulatory requirements.
Recovery doesn’t end when systems come back online. It continues until normal business operations are restored, which is why access to experienced engineers 24/7 can make all the difference during a disruptive event.
When Current Providers No Longer Meet Your Needs
A big challenge many IT teams are facing today is Broadcom’s provider and licensing changes to the VMware ecosystem.
Broadcom reduced the VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) program from more than 350 providers to just 14. If your DR provider isn’t one of them, how will they support your VMware workloads going forward? It’s critical to be working with a provider that can.
Stretch Your Disaster Recovery Budget
Traditional DR design often requires fully licensed recovery environments that sit idle 365 days a year. For a 500-VM environment, that can exceed $300,000 annually in VMware licensing alone. DRaaS changes that model by aligning license consumption with actual failover events instead of idle standby capacity.
Building Disaster Recovery Resilience, a Success Story
When Bob Evans Farms needed to move to a managed private cloud, the migration was completed in under 48 hours with no disruption to its manufacturing locations. Expedient delivered a hybrid solution with VMware workloads in the Expedient Enterprise Cloud, databases in a private cloud, and near real-time DR replication to a geographically separate data center for added resilience and ransomware protection.
“We knew that we would get more hands-on assistance and more white-glove treatment from Expedient than some of those other larger hyperscale options.”
CIO, Bob Evans Farms
How Expedient Can Help
If you’re ready to strengthen your DR strategy, don’t wait for the next uncontained wildfire to get started.
Expedient DRaaS helps get your IT environment back online with continuous replication, failover orchestration, rigorous testing, and expert support. As one of only 14 Broadcom-authorized VMware Cloud Services Providers (VCSPs) in the U.S., we’re uniquely positioned to support your VMware-based needs and ensure you don’t experience any gaps in protection. No matter the workload, we offer three tiers of RPO and RTO objectives so you can balance costs and risks.
Start with a Preparedness Guide
Get Expedient’s Wildfire DR Readiness Guide to learn the five most common gaps in a typical DR plan, plus a 25-point checklist you can use with your own team to get an idea how to fortify your strategy.
Want to go one step further? Book a 30-minute, no-obligation conversation with Expedient’s DR team to see where your plan stands.
Calculate the Cost of Downtime
Frequently Asked Questions
How does DRaaS differ from traditional backups?
Backups protect your data. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) helps keep your business running by rapidly recovering applications, systems, and data from a separate environment when your primary infrastructure is unavailable.
What are the key elements of a good DRaaS solution?
A strong DRaaS solution should provide continuous data replication, automated failover, geographically separate recovery infrastructure, clearly defined Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs), regular recovery testing, and expert support when an incident occurs.
Why are more organizations reviewing their disaster recovery (DR) strategy now?
Business disruptions are becoming more frequent and more complex. Wildfires, severe weather, infrastructure failures, ransomware, and evolving VMware licensing have organizations reevaluating whether their current recovery plans can keep operations running when they’re needed most.
Sources
- ScienceDirect, Wildfire-power grid interactions, May 2026
- Reuters, Why wildfires pose multiple threats to US power sector, July 2026
- First Street, 79% of global data center capacity faces elevated climate risk, June 2026
- NOAA.gov, NOAA Launches Wildfire Data Portal, Expanding Public Access to Satellite Fire Information, January 2026
- Splunk and Oxford Economics, The Hidden Costs of Downtime, May 2026
