Disaster Recovery as a Service — Trends 2017

Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) market continues to evolve driven by the small and medium-sized businesses looking for solutions that combine disaster recovery (DR) with data protection and backup. Mid-market vendors that can offer combined services are likely to extend their market share in 2017.

A big focus in this market space will be on data integrity assurance. Businesses will want to be sure that their data is correct, accurate, and not corrupted. To meet this demand and expectation, DR vendors will be introducing active protection and assurance technologies with automated data healing capabilities as a measure against cyber-attacks.

Data protection is going to shift from the reactive, to a proactive mode. Active data protection technology is going to be smart enough to deal with threats it never encountered before, stopping unusual behavior, and restoring damaged data automatically. There will also be a need for verifying data authenticity. Businesses will look for a reassurance mechanism that would allow them to go back and verify that the recovered data had not been altered.

Many DRaaS solutions are primarily focused on recovering infrastructure but a short infrastructure RTO may not be of much use if it takes hours to recover applications that it’s designed to run. More and more businesses will be looking for solutions that provide application resilience functionality as part of the DR service, to allow for rapid restoration of the business functions.

In a conventional DR setup, following an infrastructure failover, applications may still need to be brought up manually. Applications such as payroll systems, accounting, CRMs often require manual intervention, especially when the data is spread across multiple servers. DRaaS of the future will address both the infrastructure and application recovery to effectively meet the business’ expectations.

With many Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud solutions available on the market, disaster recovery vendors often assume a role of a multi-cloud orchestration manager. Businesses will look to their DR provider to leverage commodity cloud services such as Microsoft Azure or AWS in the backend and look for application portability to be able to move from one environment to another, with ease.

Many SMB businesses have a hybrid cloud infrastructure setup, mixing local and cloud data storage and computing capacity. These businesses will be looking for a DR solution that is capable of taking data from one server and putting it on another, local or cloud. Today, they may want to keep data in a local datacenter. Tomorrow, they may need to move it to the cloud. DR vendors will continue to release capabilities to support such data portability.

One of the challenges businesses face today is keeping their DR setup current, in line with the production environment. When businesses add a new server to their production environment, they normally need to do the same in DR, to make sure the new server and settings are replicated appropriately. This often presents a number of challenges in a real-life situation, and as the result, gets overlooked.

DR vendors are working on new network-aware change management solutions to automate this process. The new technologies, based on machine learning and Artificial Intelligence will make DR solutions environment-aware, sensing infrastructure change automatically and incorporating them into the DR environment.

Next year’s developments in the cloud and data protection space will continue reshaping the DRaaS market. Just recovering data in a different location will no longer be enough. Customers will expect their data to be portable, verifiable, and protected against all types of cyber-attacks.

READ MORE:

• Disaster Recovery Is Your Ultimate Backup
• Acronis Disaster Recovery Service
• Disaster Recovery: What you need to know when choosing an effective Disaster Recovery plan