How Service Providers Can Use Disaster Recovery As A Catalyst To The Cloud

In 1825, the world’s first steam locomotive opened its doors to passengers. Though this was an exciting time for the railroad industry, most of the general public was petrified of the trains, believing that their bodies would melt as a result of the trains’ lightning-fast speed. The train was only reaching 30 miles per hour back then, but the newness and unknown of this technological advancement made many skeptical and hesitant to try it.

Fast-forward almost 200 years, and the same skepticism still exists. As new technologies emerge, we experience a similar hesitation with adopting these foreign and sometimes frightening advances that affect our day-to-day lives. As with the train, the automobile and the telephone, all new things go from being the exception to the norm — benefits are then realized and fear quickly disappears.

In today’s IT world, it’s now a well known fact that cloud services are crucial to the future of organizations when it comes to managing the vast amounts of data they’re faced with in the age of digital business. It took a few years, but we are now moving past the skepticism phase and quickly adopting cloud strategies. Fear is no longer the issue; instead, IT decision makers are asking themselves, “Where do I start?”

Get Off on the Right Foot

As with any new venture, getting off on the right foot, (or your train on the right track) is essential to ensuring your carefully crafted strategy is a success.

Disaster recovery as a service, or DRaaS, is an agile, cost-efficient way to begin any journey to the cloud, as it securely takes a critical piece of data management off of a CIO’s plate. Gartner estimates that, by 2018, more organizations will be using DRaaS as opposed to traditional recovery services, making it one of the fastest-growing sectors in the cloud market*. With this current market totaling around $1.3 billion, now is the perfect time to capitalize on this generation’s “train.”

Implementing a DRaaS solution allows customers to place critical production workloads and applications in cloud infrastructure for business continuity purposes, with the highly valuable proposition of avoiding capital expenses for recovery infrastructure and instead leveraging the economies of scale of cloud. Once an organization has successfully conducted failover testing, and feels comfortable with its DR solution in the cloud, the burden and intimidation of moving additional workloads to the cloud is eliminated. For that reason, DRaaS is regarded as the fastest onramp to cloud.

Determining an entry point to approach a cloud services strategy is a challenge; however, starting with DRaaS will add a robust offering to your services portfolio and expand your customer base.

For more information and to learn more, check out VMware’s Disaster Recovery as a Service offering.

All aboard,

Mauricio Barra

Mauricio Barra is Senior Product Marketing Manager, Storage Product Marketing, VMware. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of Talkin’ Cloud’s annual platinum sponsorship.

*Source: Gartner’s 2015 Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service