Cloud-based recovery offers resellers a new market in which profitability can be excellent, says Greg Wyman, StorageCraft Asia Pacific vice president.
The future of data backups lies in cloud-based recovery. Evidence from our partners confirms fourth-generation real-time recovery solutions are solving most of the backup, recovery and disaster recovery issues their customers face daily.
The next logical move for archival and offsite disaster recovery is to migrate backups to the cloud, or to remote locations.
By backing up at the sector level instead of file or block levels, real-time recovery solutions reduce or eliminate backup windows, cut cost and complexity and enable restores of files in seconds.
They also restore physical, virtual or cloud servers in minutes rather than hours or days.
Finally real-time recovery enables local, remote and cloud disaster recovery. Once their data reaches the cloud for archiving, customers need to test its recoverability. They need to be confident they can recover files, folders or even complete servers in the event of disaster at the primary site.
Their wish-list has led to a new breed of solutions that are benefiting resellers – Recovery-as-a-Service, or RaaS. Moving customers to subscription-based recovery-as-a-service-based solutions opens up a new world of possibilities. If the RaaS solution is based on real-time recovery technology, a perfect solution can be built for almost any end user with almost any budget.
New market; high profitability
Especially compelling for resellers is the fact that this is a relatively new market in which profitability can be excellent. Partners are able to leverage existing cloud infrastructure providers to reduce their initial investment, or build an entire infrastructure to provide competitive advantages – it is their choice.
By combining real-time recovery, replication, enterprise-class DR and the cloud, RaaS makes levels of recovery available to businesses of all sizes - from small to medium to enterprise - that were previously affordable only by organisations with very deep pockets.
Cloud-based DR is the latest and possibly the most exciting development for customers and partners. With affordable extensions to a real-time recovery solution (replication can start at just $200), resellers are able to start building cloud-based archival, recovery and DR solutions.
What makes this technology exceptionally compelling is that large infrastructure is not required at the remote site or cloud location – minimal infrastructure is adequate until a disaster occurs and the cloud DR site in invoked and put into a production state.
The pre-staged virtual machines are then spun up as either VMware or Hyper-V virtual machines and turned on. What once cost hundreds of thousands of dollars now costs less than mere thousands – making remote disaster recovery exceptionally available and affordable.
So how soon will the cloud become the ‘accepted’ target for remote disaster recovery? Just as soon as businesses can test their recovery capabilities.
Any recovery is only as good as the last tested backup. Fortunately many organisations are now testing the recoverability of their backups automatically every night through extension solutions.
Resellers can add this to a customer’s infrastructure for only a couple of hundred dollars per year for 10 servers, as part of their migration from selling backup products to recovery solutions.