Some estimates have claimed that DRaaS solutions are on pace to become a near €11 billion industry by 2020, and examining the Irish marketplace, Hughes said that there are “companies like Egenera (Xterity Cloud), Ergo as well as companies like Another 9, who emulate other market’s leading providers by using Veeam and Zerto.”
In the case of the former, Veeam specialise in high-speed recovery, data loss avoidance, verified protection and other prime elements of an always-on data centre offering. Zerto meanwhile focuses on hypervisor-based data replication software for VMWare, Hyper-V and AWS to ensure disaster recovery in virtualised and cloud data centres.
Hughes also found it interesting that, from what he has seen, Eir “doesn’t seem to be moving the way that Verizon, CenturyLink, Windstream and other telcos in the US have moved to expand their data centre offerings.”
Increase in spend
Ruth Caulfield, senior manager for PwC Technology Consulting said that she has certainly seen an increase in spend on business continuity across the Irish marketplace over the past 12 months, both cloud-based and otherwise, adding that this surge in interest is no doubt prevalent in some sectors more than others.
The financial services sector, for one, she said is “where business continuity programmes tends to be more mature.” Caulfield said that much attention has been paid to moving towards dealing with any form of service failure in a clear, concise manner, “with IT resilience being a key area of focus.”
She commented that this reaction was no doubt linked to “high profile incidents and outages”, whilst also adding that “we have certainly seen the regulator taking a more active interest in this space.” However, she did add that on a more general note, across all sectors, “the increasing awareness and risk of cyberthreats has been pushing spend on organisational and IT resilience as organisations seek to avoid service disruptions, security breaches and the associated reputational damage and remediation costs.”
The aforementioned Gartner report, focusing on predictions for business continuity and IT disaster recovery management, was written by analysts Roberta J Witty, Dave Russell and John P Morency. They predicted, among other things, that by 2020, 16% of storage systems will be self-protecting, “obviating the need for back-up applications.” It was claimed too that by the time 2018 rolls around, 50% of organisations (up from 27% in 2014), will use managed failovers “as an alternative to traditional recovery testing.”
While finally, by the end of 2020, Witty wrote, 15% of all consumer-level digital businesses “will fail due to inadequate protection against unplanned end-to-end transaction downtime.” Any interruptions lead to business transactions not being completed, affecting customer allegiance “and the revenue stream expected from the digital business offering,” she wrote.
By the end of 2020, 15% of all consumer-level digital businesses will fail due to inadequate protection against unplanned end-to-end transaction downtime. Any interruptions lead to business transactions not being completed, affecting customer allegiance and the revenue stream expected from the digital business offering, Roberta J Witty
Biggest differentiators
Making predictions of his own as he looks ahead to where the market moves next, IDC’s Hughes felt that over the course of the next year, there is set to be “significant movement” by disaster recovery software providers to “entrench themselves further with data centre providers.” Continuing, Hughes said that over the next 12 months, “the biggest differentiators will be based on the value of data from the user portal, up front consulting services and follow on support.”
Hughes said that in a recent MarketScape study – MarketScape being an IDC’s “vendor assessment tool” for the ICT industry – of the North American DRaaS market, they found that the leaders in this market “are those that put the user interface and customer service as core priorities for a successful service offering.”
Gartner’s most recent look at the DRaaS market meanwhile pointed to Massachusetts-based Actifo as the prime movers, who are meeting the changing needs of the market by pioneering “copy data virtualisation.” This refers to the processing of virtualising data and creating a single “gold copy” available for instant access and use. This frees application data from underlying infrastructure, “replacing the many siloed systems you’re using today to protect and access copies of the same production data,” added Gartner’s 2015 DRaaS ‘Magic Quadrant’ summary.
Away from the industry’s high end though, IDC’s Hughes did offer advice for DRaaS buyers on tight budgets. They should, he said, not assume that smaller emerging players are a weaker choice. “Results showed that enterprises using smaller vendors for DRaaS had similar or better customer experiences than those using a larger established provider,” said Hughes. “We also feel that disaster recovery should be different from your primary storage vendor, if you are using managed storage services as the basis of your data management strategy.”
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