Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solutions are among the hottest trends in the IT industry. Research and Markets predicts that the DRaaS market will see a compound annual growth rate of 52 percent through 2019. Markets and Markets and TechNavio expect the DRaaS market to increase from about $1.5 billion in 2015 to as much as $14 billion by 2020.

DRaaS is a cloud-based disaster recovery (DR) model that provides for data replication to a service provider’s data center and failover of key systems in the event of disaster. DRaaS is becoming increasingly popular as more organizations recognize the severe impact of downtime while looking to minimize IT infrastructure costs.

DRaaS offers a compelling value proposition. DRaaS has emerged due to the cost and complexity of building, maintaining and operating your own DR site. Your organization will have to rent data center space and purchase and implement the DR systems and storage infrastructure. After implementation, there are ongoing costs for maintaining and securing the DR site. Storage costs are likely to increase as corporate data is constantly backed up.

The DR site will have to be kept up-to-date as your primary data center evolves. Because there needs to be a reasonable distance between the DR site and your primary data center, ongoing operations can be difficult.

On the other hand, DRaaS involves minimal capital costs and lower operational costs. The DR infrastructure is owned, maintained, secured and staffed by a third-party service provider in exchange for a monthly fee. Because staffing and technology resources are shared, ongoing costs are greatly reduced.

According to a Forrester study, DRaaS is becoming increasingly popular due to concerns about backing up critical data and applications and high storage-related costs. With DRaaS, organizations utilize a service provider’s shared resources instead of hosting and managing an ever-expanding environment at an offsite DR facility. Also, DRaaS enables more frequent data backups, making it easier to maintain business continuity should disaster strike.

But DRaaS is more than just cloud-based infrastructure. Best-in-class DRaaS solutions add multiple layers of services, including DR planning and testing, real-time data replication, data security, and ongoing management and support. As with anything delivered “as-a-Service,” you benefit from the service provider’s specialized expertise.

Here are the key factors to consider when choosing a DRaaS provider:

• Ongoing replication of essential physical and virtual servers and a recovery plan for mission-critical applications.
• A virtual recovery environment that include private network connectivity, security, server redundancy and automated failover.
• 24×7 support that makes it possible to operate in the provider’s cloud environment until operations are restored at your primary data center.
• Frequent, scheduled testing of the disaster recovery system.
• Geographically dispersed data centers with adequate power, security and redundancy.

IPC has relationships with DRaaS providers who can take the capital costs and worry out of your DR plan. Let us help you develop the right DR strategy for 2016 and beyond.