Gartner looks into RaaS

Disaster happen, we all know that. But when it comes to the provision of IT services to businesses, there are two key factors involved. One is the ability to detect a potential disaster early enough to defend against it and even prevent it happening at all. The other is the ability to recover from any such disaster quickly and efficiently, with the minimum damage being done to the business.

The latter is an emerging and readily definable category. It is also one that is increasingly being delivered as a cloud service, RaaS (Recovery as a Service). This has been recognised as an individual `slice’ of the service delivery pie by Gartner Research, which has recently published a report, `Critical Capabilities for Recovery as a Service’.

This does beg the question as to whether the `recovery’ piece is a separate category in business terms from the detection and prevention piece, as they both contribute to the overall task of keeping the business running if at all possible. However, the Gartner research estimates that the global RaaS market will be worth approximately $564 million in 2013, with a projected compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of at least 21 percent during the next three years.

One of the 11 vendors covered by Gartner in the research, certified VMware vCloud Datacentre provider,  Bluelock, has been talking about its coverage, which “We consider our inclusion in Gartner’s Critical Capabilities for Recovery as a Service to be a strong testament in our ability to understand the market’s need for simpler, more affordable disaster recovery options”evaluates them all against seven critical capabilities: physical and virtual system recovery, testing and declaration, service manageability, pricing policy, resiliency, security and compliance, and value-added services. It then sets these against the key areas essential to the selection of RaaS services for four use cases.

According to the company, Bluelock’s RaaS provides a unique solution by combining the benefits of a VMware-based multi-tenant cloud with the latest replication technology to get a highly reliable and testable recovery solution. It also claims this is then available at a competitive price.

No application modification is required to obtain protection, and customers recover into a proven, enterprise-grade virtual Datacentre hosted in the public cloud. This has a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of four hours or less and a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 30 minutes or less. Bluelock also provides implementation and disaster recovery professional services.

“We consider our inclusion in Gartner’s Critical Capabilities for Recovery as a Service to be a strong testament in our ability to understand the market’s need for simpler, more affordable disaster recovery options,” said Christopher Clapp, CEO, Bluelock. “As organisations become more reliant on the technologies that power revenue streams and operations, they need to have the right balance of technology, services and price to be insured against worst-case scenarios.”

The Gartner Critical Capabilities methodology requires analysts to identify the critical capabilities for a class of products. Each capability is then weighed in terms of its relative importance overall, as well as for specific product use cases. Next, products are rated in terms of how well it achieves each of the critical capabilities. A score that summarises how well they meet the critical capabilities overall, and for each use case, is then calculated for each product.