Disaster recovery, once a relative afterthought or nonentity in business planning, is now a central consideration. Advanced threats and high-profile data breaches have helped to convince organizations that it's time to stop dragging their feet and start taking disaster recovery more seriously. The rapid rise of the market for disaster-recovery-as-a-service highlights an important shift in priorities.
According to TechNavio, the global market for DRaaS is expected to rise at a compound annual growth rate of 54.6 percent between 2014 and 2018. Demand for hybrid and cloud-based disaster recovery has driven investment, especially in small- and medium-sized businesses that have found a "flying under the radar" approach by virtue of their size is no longer a viable approach to avoiding the consequences of information security compromises.
Larger organizations have also realized that IT departments are generally unable to maintain complete oversight and disaster recovery protection amid data deluges and rapid network expansion. To cite one sector, the banking industry has begun to invest heavily in the cloud to relieve the amount of resources it has to spend on application updates, software patches and IT infrastructure, according to Bank Systems & Technology.
The report did note that relying too much on a generic cloud solution or paying insufficient attention to backup data could diminish the effectiveness of DRaaS investment. A company is better served by using a multi-service provider that focuses on customization, specificity and addressing pain points. This way, it can avoid any data integrity or governance issues stemming from a lackluster vendor.