A Close Look At Leaders In Rapidly Growing DRaaS Market

IT acronyms that can be pronounced as words and used in complete sentences are the most fun kind. SaaS or SAS (“Beyonce shows a lot of SaaS”) and PaaS (“That Tom Brady throws quite a PaaS”) are two examples.

Ready or not, the IT industry has added DRaaS (“Don’t do anything DRaaS-tic”) to the mix. This stands for disaster recovery as a service, and it’s becoming a big seller very quickly because DR is a pain to set up, test and maintain on premises. DR in the cloud is good a way for a business to be well covered and not have to think about it.

DRaaS refers to services that offer business continuity by enabling data backup, recovery and retrieval. It is the process of replicating virtual servers to protect and back up data in the case of man-made or natural disasters.

Some of the key players in this nascent sector include Veeam, CenturyLink’s DataGardens, TwinStrata, Unitrends, Asigra, Infrascale, Cirrity, Intronis, Zerto, Iland and VelocityCloud.  All the usual household-name suspects (IBM, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, VMware, Oracle, Dell) also have their own versions of this service.

The upside to this sub-sector of IT is a healthy one; the estimated size of the global market is expected to balloon to $6 billion to $12 billion by 2020. MarketsandMarkets is projecting a $12 billion DRaaS market by 2020, and that’s a far cry from the $1.4 billion worth of DRaaS sold in 2015.

Global Industry Analysts is much more conservative at $6.4 billion global sales by 2020. Gartner Research estimates that the size of the DRaaS market will eventually far exceed that of traditional on-prem DR services.

The single major inhibitor of DRaaS sales is the widespread lack of DR planning among small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and midrange companies. This is because DR most often takes a back seat to daily production issues and only gets full attention when management insists on it.

Following is an alphabetical listing of global DRaaS leaders, based on market sales, industry research andeWEEK resources. We also include some detail on what distinguishing features each vendor brings to the job.

Acronis

Acronis Disaster Recovery Service is a comprehensive DRaaS service that provides protection and restoration of data, servers and full data centers. Its model is an adjustable, pay-as-you-go service that migrates, protects and recovers data in physical, virtual and cloud environments. This recovery service provider’s goal is to simplify and reduce the costs of protecting your data.

Strengths:

–Extensive knowledge of hybrid recovery configurations.

–A recovery console gives clients authority over management, reporting and analytics.

–Full automation offers runbook austerity.

–Uses automated and segregated recovery testing for client convenience.

Acronis migrates, protects and recovers data in physical, virtual and cloud environments. Its goal is to simplify and reduce the costs of protecting your data. Acronis is designed for midsize organizations and enterprises and offers self-service Web-based disaster management for a hands-on experience with your data recovery. Its push-button recovery uses automated runbook procedures to recover entire data centers at once and automated testing allows for regular assessment.

Bluelock

Bluelock provides DRaaS for complex environments and sensitive data to help companies mitigate risk with confidence. Bluelock supports unique requirements, such as multi-tiered recovery, mixed configuration environments with physical and virtual machines, and complex security requirements. The company is known for its Recovery Assurance program, which incorporates deliberate processes and services designed to ensure that clients are completely confident its disaster recovery plan will work when needed.

Strengths:

–Has strong professional services and robust on-boarding, training and runbook development processes, which are demonstrated through its Recovery Assurance Program.

–Offers DRaaS solutions designed for sensitive data and compliance (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act/ Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HIPAA/HITECH)).

–Its client portal, Bluelock Portfolio, allows clients to track and manage service costs, resources and RPO realization.

–Has experience with hybrid recovery configuration (virtual and physical machines) support and experience managing large enterprise recovery configurations.

Bluelock ranks highly in client satisfaction within the DRaaS industry with a Net Promoter Score of 81 (a score of 50 is considered world-class). It is also recognized by Gartner as a “visionary” in the Magic Quadrant for DRaaS.