HotLink Corp. today is announcing a new disaster-recovery-as-a-service offering that uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide data protection and business resiliency at a price point it thinks midsize businesses will like.

The new offering combines the company’s disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity software with managed services and cloud delivery on a turnkey basis at prices beginning as low as $50 per virtual machine per month on an annual contract. It’s aimed at companies running hybrid clouds using VMware Inc. and HotLink’s DR Express, which the company said is the only VMware-certified DR/BC software that is integrated with VMware management.

HotLink specializes in helping organizations to manage increasingly complex hybrid cloud environments using the familiar VMware vCenter environment. Last August the company rolled out a cloud management platform that promises to unite management of major public and private cloud platforms under a single console based upon vCenter.

The new offering is intended to address the lack of disaster planning that plagues most IT organizations. In its 2014 annual report, the Diaster Recovery Preparedness Council gave 73 percent of the 243 organizations it studied a “D” or “F” rating for their ability to recover critical IT systems in the event of a serious outage or disaster. Lack of funding, time and skills were the three most-cited reasons for the shortfall.

HotLink is proposing to address all three areas. Its offering first analyzes the customer environment to make sure applications are restorable and that virtual machines can be synchronized with AWS. It then provides monitoring and testing on a continuous basis to look for changes such as system failures or-a customer inadvertently switching off protection to reconfigure storage and failing to turn it back on.

“The idea is to let customers focus on their day-to-day operations and have Hotlink do the systematic monitoring so your operation can be restored,” said Lynn LeBlanc, CEO of HotLink. “We don’t connect with the customer unless it’s an issue automation can’t solve.”

HotLink identifies recovery point objectives and provides systematic validation of the backup site, including the status of all protected workloads.  Customers can manage business continuity operations using their existing VMware infrastructure and recovery plans can be built using vCenter-compatible tools. HotLink said protected workloads, file servers and database servers are usually restored within a few minutes of failure.

The service is priced in gold, silver and platinum tiers providing weekly, daily and continuous service level delivery for as low $50, $67 and $100 per VM per month on an annual contract, respectively.