2015 will be an important year for businesses as they look to the cloud to fulfil their disaster recovery (DR) needs.
So says Kemal Balioglu, VP of products at Quorum, who notes disaster recovery as a service (DRAAS) offers a flexible platform that empowers businesses to resume operations seamlessly in the event of a disaster - rather than simply recovering data - and achieve incredible value even in the absence of a disaster or data interruption event.
In a recent report, Transparency Market Research says DRAAS provides organisations with a variety of cost-efficient ways to recover and replicate critical servers and data centre infrastructure to the cloud environment in case of any disaster resulting in disruption of services.
The research firm says some of the major forces driving the disaster recovery services market are virtualisation, high levels of automation, easy deployment, recovery, location independence, secure storage and backup, 24x7 support, management and control, along with high utility-based dynamism.
It adds DRAAS is becoming an attractive solution among enterprises. The main reason for this is its pay-as-you-go pricing model that can lower operating costs drastically. Implementation of DRAAS with a virtualised cloud platform can be automated easily while minimising the recovery time after a failure, says Transparency Market Research.
Moreover, Balioglu says, advances in DRAAS have enabled an industry-first - the ability for businesses to decide the level of protection at a server level; mission-critical servers can be set to recover instantly, while other servers with less-critical data might be set to recover at a longer recovery time objective, creating cost efficiency.
"Because DRAAS is easy to deploy and manage, compared to traditional non-cloud disaster recovery solutions, we can expect to see a rapid increase in adoption, particularly in the mid-market," says.
According to Balioglu, there is also speculation that some traditional vendors are collaborating to provide a DRAAS solution by the end of 2015.
He believes, as demand for next-generation cloud-based business continuity solutions accelerates, the channel is well-positioned to benefit from an explosion of lucrative opportunities.
"Still, it will be critical for the channel and vendors alike to educate customers on the power of cloud-based DR solutions."
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