Vendor Comparison in Disaster Recovery as a Service

[106 Pages Report] In any business, data is one of the vital elements to run the daily operations. It has become essential for enterprises, especially IT firms, to store and protect data for business continuity. In today’s data-driven world, voluminous data being generated at a rapid pace is one of the biggest challenges for all businesses. They are witnessing a surge in the amount and type of data they are responsible for, such as business applications, compliance records, and email archiving. Enterprises focus on Disaster Recovery (DR) planning, which involves policies, processes, and procedures. These are related to being ready-to-recover and ensure business continuity, in regards to technological infrastructure of the organization in the unfortunate event of a disaster, whether manmade or natural. Traditionally, enterprises used tapes for data storage and backup at off-premise data centers. However, cloud-based DR services offer numerous advantages over the traditional backup & disaster recovery methods and are being adopted especially by Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). Moreover, DR services provided through the cloud minimize the Operational Expenditure (OPEX) and Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) incurred. It has been observed that the DRaaS market is increasingly being adopted by enterprises, due to its pay-as-you-go pricing model. This model reduces the total cost to a great extent, as organizations need to pay only for their usage.

MarketsandMarkets defines Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) as the protection and replication of a company’s data on physical or virtual servers, to ensure business continuity in the event of manmade or natural disasters. DRaaS combines various service capabilities, such as cloud-to-cloud recovery, flexible deployment, cloud replication, and mobile backup.

DRaaS includes monitoring of data backup, recovery processes, and alerting the user in case of disaster, to protect business-critical data. The key functionalities covered by DRaaS include replication, backup & recovery, enterprise data archiving, and data isolation & security. It is extremely useful for the SMEs & large enterprises that lack the expertise and are unaware of the benefits of cloud-based DR.

The report on Vendor Comparison in DRaaS based on MnM DIVE Methodology analyzes and evaluates the key vendors in the DRaaS market.

To know about the assumptions considered for the study, download the pdf brochure

Vendor Inclusion Criteria

We have selected 25 vendors for the evaluation, based on their breadth of service offerings and robust business strategies. The focus of our vendor evaluation was on the service they offer in the DRaaS market. A comprehensive list of all the vendors in this market was created through a service mapping strategy and MarketsandMarkets analysis. Based on their capabilities, innovations, and breadth of service offerings, vendors were shortlisted. Our selected vendor mix includes top 25 DRaaS vendors, selected based on the above-given parameters.

Vendors Evaluated

The report covers a comprehensive study of the key vendors offering DR services. We have evaluated 25 vendors, including Acronis International GmbH, Amazon Web Services, Inc., Axcient, Inc., Bluelock LLC, Cable & Wireless Communications Limited, CenturyLink, Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc., Datto, Inc., Evolve IP, LLC, Geminare Incorporated, HP Enterprise Company, IBM Corporation, iland Internet Solutions, Infrascale Inc., Iron Mountain Incorporated, Microsoft Corporation, NTT Communications, Peak 10, Inc., Recovery Point Systems, Sungard AS, TierPoint, LLC, Vision Solutions Inc., VMware, Inc., Zerto Inc., and Zetta, Inc.

The MnM DIVE matrix will look like below:

DRaaS is a cloud-based backup and recovery service that protects and recovers data from any manmade or natural disaster. It is the replication and hosting of physical or virtual servers by a third-party, to provide failover in the event of a disaster. Disaster can occur in many ways, such as communication failures, power outages, downtimes, data losses, fires, floods, hurricanes, hardware failures, software bugs, security breaches, service disruptions, nuclear actions, and terrorism. It is very critical for enterprises and consumers to protect their data for ensuring business continuity. DR services provided through the cloud minimize the Operational Expenditure (OPEX) and Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) incurred.

Cloud-based DR allows enterprises to store the data and operate their systems on the cloud. It also reduces the costs, speeds up recovery, and frees up resources for other business-critical tasks. Moreover, migration to cloud-based DR cuts the recovery process to hours from days and enables significant savings. For the successful implementation of DRaaS, it must include automated testing, failover, failback, and strong networking, which further ensures business continuity in case of natural or manmade disasters. The use of virtualized platforms for DR enables the addition of resources that can be deployed online when the disaster is detected; this further reduces the recovery time after a major failure. It had been observed that the DRaaS market is increasingly being adopted by enterprises due to its pay-as-you-go pricing model. This model reduces the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) to a great extent, as the organizations need to pay only for the usage done over a period of time.

DRaaS helps enterprises eliminate the barrier of traditional DR solutions, by offering various benefits, such as flexible recovery options, lower Recovery Point Objective (RPO) & Recovery Time Objective (RTO), data security, and reduced costs. The major growth drivers for the DRaaS market include increasing adoption rate among SMEs, benefits of faster recovery & cost-effectiveness, and reduced complexities & automation capabilities. Some of the major challenges in the DRaaS market include difficulty in achieving security & compliance and increasing need for high network bandwidths. Factors, such as adequate site separation between primary & backup site and compatibility concerns of certain applications in the cloud environment are expected to limit the market’s growth.

The report on vendor comparison in DRaaS, based on MarketsandMarkets DIVE methodology reviews major players that offer cloud-based DR services, outlines the findings, and analysis on the basis of two broad categories: service offerings and business strategies. Each category carries various criteria, based on which, the vendors are evaluated. The criteria is provided below:

Based on the extensive secondary and primary researches, key information about the vendor’s service offerings and business strategies were identified & gathered. After the completion of data gathering and verification process, the scores & weightages for shortlisted vendors against each parameter was finalized. After evaluating all the vendors, a comparison scorecard was prepared and each vendor was placed in the MnM DIVE matrix, based on their service offering and business strategy scores.

This report is instrumental in helping the stakeholders, such as DR service providers, system integrators, consultants, value-added resellers, third-party resellers, and technology partners, to make business decisions on DR service deployments.

The report covers a comprehensive study of the key DRaaS vendors, including Acronis International GmbH, Amazon Web Services, Inc., Axcient, Inc., Bluelock LLC, Cable & Wireless Communications Limited, CenturyLink, Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc., Datto, Inc., Evolve IP, LLC, Geminare Incorporated, HP Enterprise Company, IBM Corporation, iland Internet Solutions, Infrascale Inc., Iron Mountain Incorporated, Microsoft Corporation, NTT Communications, Peak 10, Inc., Recovery Point Systems, Sungard AS, TierPoint, LLC, Vision Solutions Inc., VMware, Inc., Zerto Inc., and Zetta, Inc.

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