Breaking Down Latest Forrester Wave for DRaaS Providers

Forrester’s researchers recently released their latest Wave report for Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) providers. Using their 26-criteria evaluation the analyst house highlighted 10 providers it considers most significant in the market, then plotted them on a graph and scored them for potential buyers.

The much-anticipated report shows how each vendor compares to the rest and includes the following players:

• Bluelock
• Daisy
• HPE Enterprise Services
• IBM
• iland
• NTT Communications
• Plan B
• Recovery Point
• Sungard Availability Services (Sungard AS)
• TierPoint

Forrester’s Wave report placed Sungard Availability Services, Bluelock, IBM, and iLand at the top of the list. HPE Enterprise Services, Recovery Point, Daisy, Plan B, and TeirPoint are chasing the leader’s tails with competitive solutions. And while NTT Communications made the cut, the provider is at the bottom of the barrel in this space, according to Forrester.

Let’s dive into some of the details Forrester provided on the leaders and why they made it into that category. Sungard AS was praised in the report for support replication and recovery, along with its ability to “ensure successful test execution and ongoing performance improvements.” Bluelock made the leaders bracket due to its automated recovery with machine startup, resource provisioning, assessments, hierarchy-based recovery of systems and more. Forrester listed one of IBM’s strengths as their associated recovery times, which span from just a few minutes to 6 hours. And the final leader, iLand, was complimented by Forrester on its self-service console that integrates replication solutions and allows clients to perform operations from a single location.

Each of those providers has their own cloud-based infrastructure that is not hosted by an infrastructure-as-a-service provider such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). These vendors all run client production environments out of their own cloud during disasters and tests. They also offer support for at least two replication technologies that power DRaaS services, supply a self-service portal for customers, and provide consulting services for resiliency plans along with at least two data center locations from which they give services.

The report also noted that I&O professionals are implementing DRaaS tools as the base for efficient and low-cost resiliency. These pros are looking to DRaaS providers for infrastructures that they can rely on and feel protected by. They are also looking for business continuity consulting, industry certifications, scalability, and support among other features.

Click here to check out the entire report.