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DRaaS Vendors Grow in 2015; Enterprise Adoption Still Slow

Cloud Disaster Recovery

The number of DRaaS vendors and their products increased and improved in 2015, but is still lagging behind traditional recovery solutions inside the enterprise, according to TechTarget. The reason for this is because larger organizations aren’t hindered by the types of barriers that SMBs are, and thus the majority of enterprises already have Disaster Recovery techniques in place. The fast-growing DRaaS market surged again in 2015, but due to slow-moving enterprise adoption, these vendors marketed mainly to smaller companies. As a result, SMBs and large enterprise companies alike have a seemingly infinite number of options when it comes to eradicating data loss and downtime.

To prove just how lively the DRaaS market has become over the last year, let’s take a look at some notable vendor announcements from 2015. First, Arcserve, one of the bigger names in the recovery space, expanded its backup appliance into a cloud Disaster Recovery Service with the launch of Arcserve Cloud. Predictably, the service is aimed at SMBs.

Zetta.net also launched a new DRaaS product, which was covered back in May by the folks at TechTarget. The solution does not require a local appliance and allows MSPs and organizations to run a virtualized native network within their cloud environment. Unlike Arcserve’s tool, this one targets both MSPs and enterprise organizations.

In July, Acronis updated their Backup Cloud solution and released Files Cloud, along with their very own Disaster Recovery as a Service tool. Acronis was also named to Gartner’s first ever Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service, a report which was released back in April, signaling that cloud-based recovery is here to stay.

Nearly half of the companies polled in TechTarget’s 2015 Cloud Storage Survey said that they’re using one or more cloud storage provider to store an average of 24 percent of their business vital data, and while backup was the most favored application for cloud storage, 63 percent of those who took part said that at least some of their backup data goes to the cloud, with Disaster Recovery cited by 44 percent of respondents.

As I mentioned earlier, most larger organizations shy away from DRaaS solutions because most already have a significant investment in recovery that involves hardware appliances. These companies may have already spent thousands to millions of dollars on a large-scale Business Continuity or Disaster Recovery platform. The flexibility that DRaaS tools provide SMBs not only on a financial level, but a personnel one, are the main reasons for widespread adoption amongst that demographic. George Crump, who heads up IT analyst firm Storage Switzerland, points out that of the 30,000 production instances of DRaaS in 2015, just 13 percent of those sales with vendors involved large enterprise organizations (source: Gartner).

Though enterprise organizations have been reluctant to buy in to DRaaS offerings to date doesn’t mean things will stay this way in the future, and according to Crump, 2016 could be the year that larger companies move away from their legacy recovery tools, saying: “I think the cloud will work its way up.”

Click here for our reaction to Gartner’s 2015 Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service.

This post was inspired by a recent article at Tech Target’s Disaster Recovery site.

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