ARN

Capitalising on the DRaaS market opportunity

The need for businesses to effectively and efficiently manage unplanned outages of any scale is clear in today’s environment of always-on operation and customer service. However, effective DR strategies have traditionally been problematic to implement with challenges and complications.

It would be fair to say Disaster Recovery (DR) sits high on a CIO’s priority list, if the feedback we regularly receive is anything to go by. The need for businesses to effectively and efficiently manage unplanned outages of any scale is clear in today’s environment of always-on operation and customer service.

However, effective DR strategies have traditionally been problematic to implement with challenges ranging from costs and difficulties testing DR plans and having out-of-date DR plans, to complications arising from using multiple technologies or backup and recovery tools.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offers a solution to these challenges, and has received a lot of attention recently (Veeam’s 2015 Data Centre Availability Report confirmed 70% of respondents had already invested in, or planned to invest in, DRaaS). Yet, end-users tell us it’s hard to do.

While various forms of subscription-based, DR services have been around for quite a while, true DRaaS is still largely undefined. Industry analysts, Forrester defines DRaaS as: “Services that enable customers to failover their on-premises infrastructure to a multi-tenant, cloud environment that they purchase on a pay-per-use basis.”

We feel DRaaS is a solution that IT pros should consider when and where DR requirements, budget and complexity cannot be addressed by traditional DR options. When done right, it provides flexibility, reliability and automation. However, one of the main reasons it can be hard to successfully implement is because DRaaS is often considered in addition to, or separate from, an overall data protection strategy. This pulls the focus of IT away from their current data centre investments and momentum and adds an additional layer of management complexity, often leaving businesses uncertain that they can actually recover if something goes terribly wrong.

This, combined with the growing corporate interest in DRaaS, opens up a great opportunity for service providers and resellers in the DRaaS market.

From our point of view, we believe DRaaS should be baked into a comprehensive availability strategy. Businesses should be able to enjoy a consistent user experience while reducing overall cost and complexity to protect their data via a combination of backup, replication and cloud.

Solutions like Veeam Cloud Connect make it easy, simple and transparent for service providers to offer DRaaS, enabling customers to take advantage of the benefits of hybrid cloud architecture without sacrificing that critical direct line of communication and personal relationship with the DRaaS provider. IT departments then have the ability to shift this responsibility to a service provider they know and trust, while retaining the ability to test, configure and consume the service the way they want.

For more information on the DRaaS opportunity, click here for the findings of a recent survey we ran with service providers and resellers that looked at customer interest in DRaaS.