Today’s hypercompetitive business environment requires not only maintaining the highest levels of system availability, but capitalizing on unique differentiators like data. For most businesses, data—whether customer, research-driven, or market-based—is a concrete asset that is being leveraged in new and different ways, in activities such as product development and marketing. Businesses are also storing more data than ever before, whether for revenue-generating activities, or as a result of activities like backup.

At the same time, regulations surrounding data, from the European GDPR to US-based HIPAA regulation and HITRUST certification, require data to be handled with extreme care. When companies lose data, it costs approximately $150 per record lost, with the average data breach costing businesses $3.9 million.

As a result, businesses are placing greater importance on data backup and recovery. Of businesses surveyed in 2019:
  • Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) is currently used by 45% of businesses globally to protect critical data
  • An additional 34% anticipate adopting it by 2021
  • 81% of companies cite their move to cloud as helping them to better manage their data
  • 79% expect to improve their disaster recovery capabilities
These statistics highlight a key shift that is currently taking place in the market. Some forward-thinking companies are taking a new approach to overall data management, bringing to market services that integrate numerous service - from backup to disaster recovery, to general storage and analytics - under a single, management platform. This enables their customers to focus on a core asset - their data - rather than on individual tasks like storage, or backup, or disaster recovery.

This shift has implications for the DRaaS market. As more customers seek greater assistance with data management, they seek providers that can offer a comprehensive solution. Thus, DRaaS may become one component of a larger, converged solution that includes storage and storage management - including backup scheduling, replication management, file restoration orchestration, should it become necessary, as well as the security and compliance of data.

The Global DRaaS competitive landscape is highly fragmented with more than 100 providers offering either self-service or assisted products that vie for customer attention and investment.