Among the many challenges an organization and its IT department confront on a daily basis, availability of services is particularly critical for the survival of the businesses that entrust and rely on the technologies on which their services have been built. At the same time, several legislations across different countries are creating continuous pressure on each and every organization to maintain an appropriate plan to protect and secure their data and their services.

Historically, every large enterprise has planned and built its own approach to face a disaster of small or large proportions in the most suitable way for their businesses: backups, hardware redundancy, host clustering, data mirroring, replication, geographically distributed sites, and so on, are just few identifiers for technologies and strategies to build a solution trying to address the problem.

Over the years, some of these technologies have been commoditized. Still for some of them, the financial burden to allow their implementation has been an overwhelming capital expense for many medium and small organizations. In addition, expertise is required to manage and organize the software, hardware, and storage components involved.

In this context, a great opportunity for cloud service providers has materialized. The market has increased its confidence in using cloud-based services offering a more cost-effective (subscription based) access to resources. Disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is a highly desirable service to offer to all organizations, but particularly for the ones that might have concerns or financial exposures caused by planning and building their own secondary data center site to make their services more robust and resilient to local disasters. Continue reading →