A new report from MarketsandMarkets finds that the global market for Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) will increase from $5.1 billion in 2020 to $14.6 billion by 2025, a compound annual growth rate of 23.3 percent. The COVID-19 pandemic was something of a wake-up call. More organizations are recognizing the critical importance of seamless business continuity across a distributed environment, even as they seek to control IT infrastructure costs.
Cloud-based DRaaS meets both objectives. Traditionally, disaster recovery was implemented by only the largest organizations due to the cost of building out at a secondary site. In addition to the capital outlays for the facility and IT equipment, there are ongoing costs for powering, maintaining and securing the site. That’s difficult to justify for IT infrastructure that sits idle unless there’s an emergency.
DRaaS has changed the equation. It requires little to no capital investments and no operational overhead. The DR infrastructure is owned, maintained, secured and staffed by a third-party service provider, and available for a monthly fee. Best-in-class DRaaS providers charge only for the resources you use.
Despite these benefits, DRaaS is underutilized. SirviS estimates that a staggering 80 percent of businesses do not have a reliable DR infrastructure. That creates significant business risk due to the high probability of downtime.
The Value of DRaaS
According to the Uptime Institute Global Data Center Survey, 69 percent of organizations suffered some kind of outage in 2021, with 36 percent rating the outage as serious or significant and 8 percent rating it as severe. The same report finds that outage costs are steadily rising. Almost half (47 percent) of respondents reported a single outage costing $100,000 to $1 million, up from 28 percent in 2019.
DRaaS can minimize those costs. An organization’s virtual machines and critical data are continually replicated to the public or private cloud operated by the DRaaS provider. When an outage occurs, workloads automatically fail over to the provider’s cloud and users are redirected. When normal operations resume, workloads fail back to the primary data center.
DRaaS also provides a safety net for cloud resources. Although cloud outages are relatively rare, they can be devastating — particularly as organizations rely more heavily on the cloud to support their distributed workforce. AWS recently experienced an outage on the Eastern seaboard that affected thousands of businesses. Some of them were down for more than a day, losing millions of dollars. The right DRaaS solution can reduce the risk.
Choosing the Right DRaaS Solution
There are three primary DRaaS models:
Self-service. The customer is responsible for planning, testing and managing the DR process. The provider simply hosts the backups, VMs and replication software. All of the major cloud providers offer this type of service.
Assisted. The provider helps optimize the DR process, but the customer is still responsible for implementing the DR plan.
Managed. The provider takes full responsibility for the DR process, working with the customer to ensure that all changes to the environment are updated in the DR site.
Whichever model you choose, there are several factors to consider when choosing a DRaaS provider:
Highly resilient data centers with adequate power, security and redundancy.
Ongoing replication of essential physical and virtual servers and a recovery plan for mission-critical applications.
Recovery point objectives (maximum data loss) and recovery time objectives (maximum downtime) that meet business requirements.
24x7 support for operations in the provider’s cloud environment until workloads are restored at the primary data center.
SirviS has built a world-class DRaaS platform based upon industry-leading technologies. The solution is fully managed by our experienced team and delivered from our state-of-the-art facility. We will be rolling it out soon as part of our multi-cloud strategy, so watch this space for more information.
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