DRaaS: A Remarkable Opportunity in an Immature Market

As you’re sitting down to plan what solutions to bring to your customers in the first half of 2015, you may want to put disaster recovery at the top of your list. Consider these stats:

The risk to businesses without a disaster recovery strategy is real, and the threats aren’t just natural disasters, as we well know — security attacks, network failures and spikes in service demands can all have major impacts on revenue and reputation.

But the cost of a traditional recovery solution, especially for small and midsize businesses, can be prohibitive. More and more companies are looking to disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) to protect their data and operations on a pay-as-you-go basis without busting their budgets.

All of this makes disaster recovery a low-cost way to experiment with the cloud. In fact, in a survey by market research firm TNS, 400 respondents said they consider backup and disaster recovery top candidates for the cloud — a sort of cloud “on-ramp.” It makes sense—why should they use resources to store, archive and recover when they can offload the work to someone like you who can do it cheaper with economies of scale? It allows them to get out of the “data center business.”

As Forrester reports, DRaaS providers are able to keep costs down because most clients are only consuming storage resources at any given time. Some don’t charge fees for additional self-service tests and may bundle DRaaS contracts with testing services and failover assistance.

Leading the pack are the providers who work with a variety of software solutions and support a range of platforms. Shouldn’t you be one of them?

As one of the fastest-growing segments in the cloud market, DRaaS is expected to grow from $640 million to $5.7 billion by 2018 (MarketsandMarkets). It’s a remarkable opportunity in an immature market.

If you partner with VMware, you have access to the more than 500,000 customers who have trusted us to provide private virtualized infrastructures for their data centers on-site. These tools can easily serve as the building blocks for an in-house cloud-based recovery solution for Tier 2 and Tier 3 apps that aren’t backed up today.

And until June 26, you can offer new vCloud Air Disaster Recovery customers a free one-month trial, with the option to cancel within 30 days risk-free if they are not satisfied. If you are a VMware partner, you can learn more on our Partner Central site.

Happy New Year!

Chris Waldo is Senior Director of Global Cloud Partner Marketing at VMware. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of Talkin’ Cloud’s annual platinum sponsorship.