In today’s new age of “always-on” business, prolonged downtime or even brief outages are no longer acceptable. Whether it’s at a global enterprise with thousands of employees, a 200-person organization or even a small office, all are expected to have their core information systems up and running all the time. Providing the ability to recover from downtime — scheduled or unplanned — is becoming easier and more affordable thanks to a growing number of emerging enterprise-grade cloud-based Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) options.
Many such DRaaS offerings, where organizations replicate snapshots of their data, system settings and applications to either a local or major cloud provider or dedicated hosting operator, have been around for some time from specialists such as SunGard or Verizon Communications and a variety of high-end solutions. But over the past year, the sheer number and scope of options has started to amass, and many more are building out cloud-based disaster recovery service operations with varying types of capabilities, architectures and costs.