DRaaS set to be most adopted cloud service of 2015, says Databarracks

Improved Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) maturity, greater provider choice and lower monthly service costs are playing a key role in broadening the appeal of DRaaS across a variety of organisations, regardless of size. As a result, Peter Groucutt, Managing Director of Databarracks, believes that DRaaS is becoming the cloud service of choice for those organisations looking to migrate to the cloud.

The latest figures from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) indicate that cloud adoption is at its highest figure to date, with 78 per cent of organisations now having formally adopted at least one type of cloud-based service. Research from Databarracks' annual Data Health Check survey, of over 400 IT professionals, revealed that uptake of DRaaS in particular has grown year-on-year since 2012. For the year ahead it is expected to be the top service choice for those looking to adopt cloud services.

Last week leading industry analysts Gartner published its first Magic Quadrant report for Disaster Recovery as a Service. The report highlights that "Historically, DRaaS has been thought of as having its heaviest adoption in regulated industries, such as financial services, retail and healthcare, which have government regulatory pressures to protect data. However, DRaaS providers in this Magic Quadrant reported adoption and strong interest across all verticals as the number of knowledge workers has increased and dependence on application and data availability has a direct impact on business performance. By2018, Gartner estimates that the size of the DRaaS market will exceed that of the market for more traditional subscription-based DR services" (Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service, 2015, April 21, 2015).

Groucutt believes that Gartner's research is proof of how much the disaster recovery market has matured in recent years:

"As the report points out, traditionally early adopters of DRaaS tended to be fairly small organisations, who needed to free up the time of their over-stretched in-house IT teams. For most large organisations, with big secondary sites for disaster recovery and dedicated staff for business continuity, the move to a cloud-based DR service was both too expensive and overly complex.

"The flexibility of DRaaS has changed this. As well as being more cost-effective than traditional DR, it's a lot simpler to implement. You can set it up behind the scenes, and your users will be completely unaffected – there is minimal downtime. Organisations today are under immense pressure to deal with rapidly growing data and ensure consistent uptime for their users – for them, DRaaS is a lifeline.

"Small organisations don't need dedicated in-house staff with technical disaster recovery knowledge and large organisations don't need to pay for expensive secondary sites. They can ensure their business is protected at all times, at a fraction of the cost of traditional DR."

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