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Key Takeaways: The 2020 Gartner Market Guide for Disaster Recovery as a Service

Gartner Names Winners of 2021 Voice of the Customer for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions

Key Takeaways: The 2020 Gartner Market Guide for Disaster Recovery as a ServiceAnalyst house Gartner, Inc. recently released its new Market Guide for Disaster Recovery as a Service. The researcher’s Market Guide series is meant to cover new and emerging markets where software products and organizational requirements are in limbo. Gartner’s Market Guides can be a great resource for understanding how a fledgling space may line up with current and future technology needs.

According to Gartner, “With the focus on early, more chaotic markets, a Market Guide does not rate or position vendors within the market, but rather more commonly outlines attributes of representative vendors that are providing offerings in the market to give further insight into the market itself.” Though Gartner’s Market Guide is not provider-centric, it aims to provide a more overarching view of the software space. However, the researcher does mention the major players as things take shape.

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Gartner highlights the following providers in Disaster Recovery as a Service: Expedient, Flexential, IBM Resiliency Services, iland, InterVision, Microsoft Azure Site Recovery, phoenixNAP, Recovery Point, Sungard Availability Services, TierPoint, and Webair. At Solutions Review, we read the report, available here, and pulled out the key takeaways. 

According to Gartner, many publicly available articles and providers muddle the definition of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) by conflating actual DRaaS (a service) with the components of DRaaS, such as automation, replication tools, and cloud providers. This confuses enterprises trying to select a potential solution. Gartner expands on this, stating, “hundreds of providers in the market claim to be DRaaS vendors; however, most merely provide a patchwork of glorified hosting or infrastructure as a service, fronted by a commercial off-the-shelf replication tool. Better providers have industrialized their offerings and invested in value-added service components that ensure application recovery.” Gartner predicts that by 2025, 60 percent of infrastructure and operations leaders who have developed cost-effective traditional disaster recovery capabilities will expand their roles to address newly emerging areas of IT resilience.

The report recommends that infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders responsible for IT disaster recovery should solidify scope by evaluating requirements such as workload types and recovery location needs, as well as future strategic initiatives including application modernization, cloud migration, and automation initiatives. Additionally, IT professionals should determine whether DRaaS is more appealing than do-it-yourself approaches by deciding if time to value is a high priority and if they want their team to spend time setting up tooling, creating run books, and managing the target disaster recovery location. DRaaS vendor selection can be improved by focusing on a vendor’s recovery experience and service industrialization rather than technical capabilities.

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Most DRaaS providers serving enterprise customers fall into one of three of the following categories:

  • Evolved Traditional DR Providers: These vendors are well known for traditional disaster recovery and have evolved service offerings. They distinguish themselves through decades of experience managing disaster declarations and proven competency in supporting the recovery of a wide range of non-x86 workloads. They tend to have the largest and most complex engagements.
  • Advanced Colocation/Hosting Providers: The majority of DRaaS providers fall into this category, as most began in colocation and/or hosting, added VMware-based IaaS capabilities, and then combined that with one or more ITRO products to develop the foundation of their DRaaS offerings. In addition to their own recovery data centers, these providers often offer hyperscale provider’s IaaS as potential targets.
  • Hyperscale Cloud Providers: These providers have combined global cloud infrastructure scale with replication and automation capabilities to provide DRaaS through a SaaS model. Vendors in this group tend to appeal to clients with a longer-term strategic goal to migrate to the cloud, or those with environments that are almost entirely virtualized or physical x86. Additionally, these providers often offer low-cost or low-commitment PAYGO options.

It was predicted that disaster recovery budgets would increase this year, with half of businesses expected to spend more than 7 percent of their IT budgets on disaster recovery. However, during financially challenging times due to the COVID-19 pandemic, disaster recovery is one of the first areas looked at for cost reduction.

Read the Market Guide for Disaster Recovery as a Service.

Looking to learn more? Check out Solutions Review’s other resources, including our newly updated Disaster Recovery as a Service Buyer’s Guide.

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