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Recovery-as-a-Service offers a jumpstart to the clouds
Cloud and virtualisation are both major drivers for businesses of all shapes and sizes as two strategies to reduce costs and improve operational efficiencies. However, making the transition of critical servers onto a new infrastructure can be a challenge. By Eric Webster, Doyenz.
R
ecovery-as-a-Service, a new emerging category as defined
by Gartner, offers a stepping stone for moving on-premise production servers into the cloud using business continuity as a primary driver. Once production servers have been backed up into the cloud, if a business suffers on-premise disruption, these new RaaS cloud offerings allow secure access to production server environments, ultimately providing access to critical applications the business depends on.
In the event the production servers and applications are unavailiable on-premise, organisations can now gain secure access to critical applications via an internet connection. By storing a nightly copy of the production servers in the cloud, organisations can now copy these servers and run them in a dedicated virutal lab environment to test new software patches, or upgrades without disrupting production environments. RaaS offers a feasible way for organisations to test the viability of switching to the cloud without the risk to on premise.
We spoke to Eric Webster, CMO for Doyenz, an emerging leader in RaaS, on his view of the emerging RaaS market, how it works as well as the strength, weaknesses and likely direction of the technology.
Although the figures for the adoption of cloud vary anywhere from 30% to 70% depending on which market you look at and who you ask, robust business continuity policies and systems are actually much lower focus especially in smaller organisations. Although it is clear that continuity and disaster recovery is vital for businesses of all types, adoption is still poor.
A recent survey by analyst firm Freeform Dynamics found that 58% of small organisations of between 50 to 250 employees do not have a formal disaster recovery plan, and nearly one fifth of mid-sized enterprises are in the same position. The worst offenders are SMBs
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in retail, distribution, and manufacturing, with less than 40% having drawn up formal disaster recovery plans. For small and medium firms that have limited in-house IT teams, developing a business continuity position is challenging and potentially costly.
The RaaS market However, one way in which organisations can improve business continuity is through Recovery-as-a-Service, a technology that Analyst firm Gartner believes will be adopted by 30% of midsize companies up from just over 1% today. Under the analyst firm’s definition, RaaS describes the managed replication of virtual machines (VMs) and production data in a service-provider’s cloud, together with the means to activate the VMs to support either recovery testing or actual recovery operations. The location of the data center equipment, the party housing the provider’s cloud equipment, and the price vary by provider.
Gartner sees the RaaS market being driven by midsize companies, which it defines as having annual revenues between $150 million and $1 billion. Larger companies with annual revenues or operating budgets of $1 billion or more are more likely to have established recovery management facilities, infrastructures and support teams that are too complex to move fully to the cloud. Smaller businesses are less likely to have a formal strategy for managing disaster recovery.
However, the reality is somewhat different according to Eric Webster, “If you look at 3500 customers using our RaaS, I would say a large percentage are probably under $50 million and the reason is that most didn’t have an established Disaster Recovery position and the relatively low cost of RaaS gives them an option that they can implement quickly without having to re-engineer their existing business systems.”
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