Gartner forecasts 30% of WW midsize companies will adopt recovery-as-a-service (RaaS) to support IT disaster recovery by 2014-- up from the the current figure of around 1%.
RaaS involves the replication of VMs and production data on the cloud, together with means for VM activation supporting either recovery testing or actual recovery operations.
Midsize businesses make the best RaaS customers, according to Gartner-- larger companies are more likely to have recovery management facilities and infrastructures too complex to move to the cloud, while smaller businesses are less likely to have a formal disaster recover strategy in the first place.
The analyst says RaaS can reduce (if not eliminate) recovery testing and excercising costs, while replicating and recovering application-specific and interdependent VM groups.
Organisations are also more likely to use RaaS to support more critical applications in need of short recovery times.
Two "camps" appear to form around RaaS use-- one using server virtualisation recovery features and SAN-based replication, and one implementing cloud-based pilots as an alternative to traditional disaster recover resources.
Go Gartner Says 30% of Midsize Companies Will Use Recovery-as-a-Service by 2014
