An omnichannel retailer’s DR cost the same in February as in November — while its risk did not. Standby was sized for peak trading and sat underused most of the year. Peak change freezes meant drills couldn’t be authorized when they mattered most. Store systems were excluded because protecting them at peak-sized cost was never approved. And recovery at the peak scale had never actually been tested. UPC DRaaS separated continuous readiness from on-demand compute: warm replication across the full estate with heavy compute invoked only on activation or drill — e-commerce and order management on Platinum with Active-Active topology, store systems on Gold for the first time, analytics on Active-Replicated cold storage at the lowest cost point, and a full-scale pre-peak drill run each year at the scale that actually tells the retailer something useful about November.
