The gold standard for disaster recovery has changed

Gartner claims that over 63 percent of companies are suffering from ‘mirages of overconfidence,’ regarding their disaster recovery safety and strategy. Less than a third undertake the most basic elements expected of a DR program: formalising scope, performing a business impact analysis to acquire business requirements and creating detailed recovery procedures.

That’s an opportunity for MSPs, if they have an offering suited to today’s ways of working and multi-cloud, distributed IT environments.  

Venn IT Solutions, MD Geoff Hughes, says that Covid, the widescale move to multi-cloud, and natural disasters have shifted the needs of organisations and forced a closer look at Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) requirements.

“Disaster recovery and business continuity has changed an enormous amount. We used to refer to DR and the gold standard and disaster was usually things like acts of God, fire and floods and asteroids and potentially equipment failure, which were the things that you were really protecting yourself against,” he states.

Two decades ago, the “gold standard’ was having two data centres with synchronous data replication and offsite tape-based backups running from a tertiary site, according to Hughes.

“Today, the landscape has shifted...Environments are extremely distributed and significantly more complex. There’s a mixture of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, through multiple providers of cloud services,” he notes.

“Today a gold standard feels more like automated recovery with zero data loss and zero interruption to service,” Hughes says.

“For service providers the opportunity is fix the challenge that customers face of what is the right size and how to find the practical balance between achieving business risk mitigation goals and staying within budget," Hughes adds.

DRaaS market growth

No surprise then, that the global DRaaS market is tipped to reach US$23.3 billion by 2027, according to Polaris Market Research. The Australian and New Zealand DRAAS market accounted for about AU$160 million in 2018 and is expected to reach around AU$2.2 billion by 2027.

Chris Jeffery, Sales Manager, Business Development, AC3, sees an inherent opportunity for MSPs. “The rise in the number and sophistication of cybersecurity attacks has certainly brought disaster recovery to the forefront. Organizations are realizing that the traditional definition of disaster recovery being perhaps failure of on-premise IT infrastructure and so forth has now, evolved and encompasses a much, much larger challenge for organizations.”

Jeffery points out that as organizations shift to the cloud, privacy, security of data and cybersecurity mean that DRaaS has a heightened role in solving these challenges.

Jeffery notes that whilst 28 percent of data breaches involve malware, 82% of breaches involve human error – another opportunity for MSPs.

“We know that 97 percent of data is recovered after ransomware attacks. So, when you have clients faced with those propositions, customers are looking for a safe pair of hands and peace of mind in an ‘always on’ operating environment and look after that sort of prevention aspect in an agile and cost-effective manner, and where possible, leverage their existing technology investments,” he adds.

Gartner reports that 72 pecent of organizations are poorly positioned in terms of disaster recovery capabilities. DRaaS providers are differentiating by providing options for application-level recovery, cyber-related recovery and support for cloud workloads.

Looking ahead, Hughes points out that distribution of services and data across multiple providers doesn’t absolve MSPs or customers of responsibilities around privacy and availability.

“It's part of the essential eight – backup everything and ensure responsibilities for security are understood by the client. Availability and data privacy are not absolved when you start consuming cloud-based services, you still need to be able to manage your own risk. Once you've got a plan in place, you need to think about what happens when your environment evolves, how are you going to stay up to date?”