Asigra Summit: Cloud Backup, Disaster Recovery Market Growing

Not sure what cloud service to get into next? Consider pointing your business’s direction toward cloud-based backup and recovery and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). According to Marc Staimer, president and chief dragon slayer of Dragon Slayer Consulting, the backup-as-a-service (BaaS) and DRaaS markets are not only trending, but accelerating.

It’s no secret, of course, but Staimer confirmed that enterprises are increasingly shifting their workloads to the cloud to take advantage of better productivity, simplicity, elasticity and costs. However, not all is well in the cloud realm, noted Staimer, who has the coolest job title in the world.

Staimer noted during his keynote presentation at the Asigra Partner Summit in Toronto this week that enterprises currently incorrectly believe that data protection in the cloud comes both automatically and free. Not true, Staimer said. In fact, quite the opposite. Data protection is pricey to provide, and even if there is some form of data resilience from hardware failures, cloud providers don’t include protection around human failure, site and regional disasters, or data corruption in general.

If customers want additional protection, there’s an additional cost—a price tag that many customers balk at.

At the same time, though, BaaS and DRaaS are trending—and accelerating. For some customers, it’s a cost they’re willing to meet, simply because it’s something they require. And for the channel, it presents a huge opportunity.

“Everybody I talk to wants to get into this business because there’s more money in DRaaS than there is in BaaS,” Staimer said during his keynote.

It’s a potentially highly lucrative business for cloud services providers to be into, but it comes at a cost.