Disaster Recovery as a Service Market: Why is DRaaS Integral to Businesses?

By Akhil Nair

Disaster recovery is an important process, helping organizations recover data and survive in case of disasters, including cyberattacks, accidental data loss, and natural disasters. The IT disaster recovery plan enables an organization to establish data protection strategies, determine the optimal way to recover operations, and prioritize its assets and risks. As per Inkwood Research, the surging data breaches propels the global Disaster Recovery as a Service market growth at 24.62% CAGR during 2022-2030.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is disaster recovery hosted by a third party, entailing the hosting and replication of virtual or physical servers by the provider, offering failover during power outages or in the event of a natural disaster. The basic premise of DRaaS involves reducing the impact, especially during the complete shutdown of computing resources or organizations’ physical facilities.

DRaaS: How does it work?

DRaaS uses a replication process to duplicate the data and send it to the cloud. Then, it uses cloud-based resources to produce a complete infrastructure wherein the work can be continued. It replaces traditional backup software and hardware. Whereas in the event of a disaster, like a server malfunction, the user access and full system operations are sent to the virtual environment until the primary infrastructure is back up and running.

Organizations may purchase DRaaS through a pay-per-use mode or traditional subscription model that enables them to pay only during the event of a disaster. Additionally, DRaaS plays a key role during times when organizations face a site-wide, storage, and server disaster by retrieving the most critical applications in the cloud. Besides, it can offer a secondary infrastructure during IT disruption, facilitating a backup working environment while the current one is repaired.

Why is DRaaS Integral to Businesses?

Several businesses fail to deliver or sustain themselves during an IT disaster when a simple solution like online backup could have saved them. Also, vulnerability to IT disasters is an inevitable reality. As a result, speedy recovery due to a well-crafted IT disaster recovery plan has become an ever-increasing need among businesses, given the severe consequences.

For instance, as per the National Archives and Records Administration, around 93% of companies that experience data loss and downtime for 10 days or more will file for bankruptcy within 12 months.

Therefore, IT disaster recovery plans like DRaaS are at the top of the businesses’ priority list. The foremost benefit of DRaaS is business continuity despite the circumstances.

Here are a few more reasons why:

• Cost-Efficiency

Among the multiple components of a disaster recovery plan, the most important elements include detective measures for quick identification of unwanted events, preventive measures that minimize the risk of man-made disasters, and corrective measures that restore lost data and facilitate businesses to resume after a disaster. The accomplishment of these goals needs innovative solutions that guarantee business continuity and prioritize cybersecurity, IT systems maintenance, and analysis of potential threats.

Moreover, unplanned attempts to recover lost data can incur high expenses. Downtime itself is expensive. For instance, as per Datto, a downtime incident can cost from $10,000 per hour for small businesses to over $5 million per hour for enterprises. Besides, a quick recovery is more expensive.

With DRaaS, businesses can rapidly recover without incurring major costs of redundant and additional hardware. Moreover, flexible pay modes and varied options to meet RTO and RPO objectives allow businesses to meet their requirements.

Furthermore, DRaaS allows the utilization of cloud computing power. Besides, it helps minimize infrastructure costs, thus eliminating the need to buy expensive servers for backup storage.

• Seamless Scalability

DRaaS has no loose ends to chase and is considered an effective insurance policy protecting a company’s vital systems from business disruptions. This is because it provides one unified solution to recover from all types of disasters, from ransomware and malware to wildfires and hurricanes. Also, data is stored in multiple places, leaving no room for a single point of failure. In addition, it can shrink or grow on demand since it is on a virtual platform.

Further, businesses can customize their recovery scope based on their resources, RTO & RPO objectives and needs, and choose the manner of protection for their most critical applications. The options range from hot site recovery and continuous replication to warm site recovery and time-based backup.

According to our evaluations, real time replication services will be the largest revenue-generating service in the global DRaaS market by 2030, with a 33.47% share.

• Accessibility

DRaaS is a cloud-based solution, enabling access to the system from any location with an internet connection. Even in pressing situations (most recently, the pandemic lockdowns), remote servers can be managed from any location. Also, the control of IT infrastructure is not lost, with IT engineers able to manage applications and data storage, recover lost data, run back-ups, and run and analyze reports.

As per our estimates, private cloud will be the fastest-growing deployment type by 2030, with a CAGR of 27.23%.

• Data Security and Safety

With DRaaS, data is securely stored and backed up in a remote data center and thereby protected against unauthorized access and unexpected loss. DRaaS providers use state-of-the-art infrastructure with absolute redundancy and no single point of failure. In addition, cloud-based service providers deploy sophisticated encryption, timely & regular security patches to protect data centers, and reliable security protocols.

Disaster Recovery as a Service Market Scope

Business firms realize the economic benefits of minimizing their system’s downtime. However, swift recovery becomes difficult in the traditional method of data storage since it is stored on tapes and disks. Any interruption in the IT infrastructure due to human intervention or power failure impacts the whole IT infrastructure taking more time to recover data.

With DRaaS, organizations can recover and access their data more swiftly. Also, cloud-based disaster recovery services are more manageable and flexible than traditional disaster recovery services. Moreover, DRaaS offers automated and reliable recovery operations. Besides, within minutes, businesses can recover from an immediate system failover to a secondary infrastructure. As a result, the surging need for faster recovery and flexibility offers lucrative growth opportunities for the global Disaster Recovery as a Service market.