Disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) is becoming popular among organisations as they look to mitigate the risks presented by migrating existing on-premises applications to a true cloud environment.
So says Bryan Balfe, enterprise account manager at CommVault, who notes disaster recovery (DR) has been around for decades, but has typically fallen 'below-the-line' as a priority for many IT departments due to lack of budget, time, or know-how.
As a result, says Balfe, too many organisations had to simply operate with the ongoing risk that if a natural disaster or man-made error disrupted operations, their data and applications could be wiped out.
In the past, he notes, this was something that many organisations just lived with and adapted to. "Organisations that did have DR solutions in place were typically those with deep pockets or in industries that mandated it," he says.
"The approach was expensive and resource-intensive, requiring duplicate resources to be kept online at offsite locations - owned and operated by an organisation's internal IT staff, or by outsourcing providers who often specialised in DR."
Balfe notes with DRaaS-use cases, an organisation can more quickly and easily develop a strategy, prove it out, and then further expand.
"This provides bite-sized steps that organisations can take to leverage the advantages of cloud infrastructure. This is especially valuable for mid-sized to smaller organisations who are often eager to adopt but don't have as much to spend on cloud initiatives."
According to analyst firm, Markets and Markets, the global DRaaS and cloud-based business continuity is forecast to grow from $640.8 million in 2013 to $5.77 billion by 2018, at a compound annual growth rate of 55.2%.
Gartner says although the enterprise applicability of DRaaS is growing clearer, some confusion as to the value proposition of DRaaS still remains.
The market analyst firm observes many organisations do not have the infrastructure resources or support staff expertise to support IT disaster recovery management.
Although the initial DRaaS support scope was for virtual machines only, Gartner points out a growing number of organisations require recovery management support for hybrid configurations that are made up of virtual and physical servers, as well as other types of physical equipment, such as storage area networks.
Gartner analyst John Morency says although DRaaS has been around since 2008, much confusion still remains as to its value. Consequently, he notes, several assumptions surrounding DRaaS have emerged, some of which are true.
"Today, IT leaders believe, for instance, that by implementing DRaaS, they will be able to simplify IT disaster recovery management and reduce costs. They also believe that DRaaS will provide failover and failback whenever they need it and that DRaaS will operate equally effectively in production configurations of any size," says Morency.
According to Gartner, because DRaaS is consumed as a service, its cost is largely dictated by the scope of compute and storage resources that need to be recovered, along with the complementary services that a business needs.
However, Morency says, in contrast to traditional syndicated recovery services whose monthly costs are mainly based upon physical system and storage hardware, recurring DRaaS service costs are mainly for virtual resources which include the number of virtual machines, virtual cores, and virtual storage.
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