DRaaS an opportunity for managed service players

The channel might have expected the conversation around data backup and recovery to be one that has moved on from a fairly basic level, with the pressure of compliance regulations and numerous breaches forcing users to get on top of their policies in this area.

Sadly that does not appear to be the case with many losing data as a result of a data centre outages, who then find themselves in a position where they are struggling to recover information.

For many the cloud has acted as a crutch giving the opportunity to reach out for data that can be restored and in some cases users are doing that five times or more a year.

Research from the fifth annual Unitrends cloud and disaster recovery survey makes interesting reading for any managed service provider involved in the backup and recovery world.

The headline findings were that 30% of those organisations quizzed by the firm admitted they had lost information through a data centre outage last year and 42% had experienced downtime as an additional problem.

More than half of the customers revealed they headed to the cloud to recover data and a similar amount also claimed they tested their backup processes at least annually.

“It is concerning that most enterprises don’t really know for sure if they can recover their applications after a downtime event as they test rarely or not at all. The need to continuously test recovery tools is critical to ensuring speedy business restoration," said Joe Noonan, vice president of product management, Unitrends and Spanning.

Unitrends merged with managed services specialist Kaseya back in May and there appear to be positives for those providing hosted options with an increasing number of customers choosing to let the cloud take the strain with disaster recovery plans.

“The survey highlights that cloud is now an active part of the data storage infrastructure of a growing number of organisations today,” added Noonan. “We are also seeing cloud-based disaster recovery-as-a-service (DraaS) becoming an increasingly widely adopted tool in data and application protection. 80% of survey respondents told us they either used the cloud for DraaS or planned to do at some point in the future.”

The attraction of getting involved in the backup and recovery market saw StorCentric make its third acquisition in the space of a year earlier this week, with the firm picking up Retrospect.

The deal, struck for an undisclosed sum, will see StorCentric adding the capabilities of a business that has been targeting the mid-market space.

“At StorCentric, we are focused on providing solutions to protect our customers’ digital information, and with this acquisition, we can now offer unrivalled backup and recovery solutions," said Mihir Shah, CEO at StorCentric.