SMBs Slow to Adopt Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service - ActualTech Media/Infrascale

Small to mid-sized companies have been slow to adopt disaster-recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) solutions because of concerns about high cost, lack of IT resources, and solution complexity, according to the 2015 DRaaS Attitudes & Adoption Report, developed by ActualTech Media, LLC.

More than 350 technology professionals from organizations with between 100 and 5,000 employees responded to the survey, conducted from July 15th to July 20th by ActualTech Media principals Scott Lowe and David Davis for sponsor Infrascale, Inc., provider of secure, cloud-managed DR.

The perceived high cost of DR is the primary inhibitor to DRaaS adoption for 36% of respondents and the most important purchase criterion. The lack of in-house IT resources and solution complexity were also listed as barriers to adoption.

The study showed that organizations use a variety of methodologies to perform DR. While 46% of respondents backup to a secondary appliance, 22% still use tape and offsite storage as their primary DR methodology. Perhaps this is why only 10% of respondents could fail over critical business applications within 15 minutes.

“We believe this data indicates that small and mid-sized companies are largely being under-served when it comes to emerging DR and DRaaS solutions,” said Scott Lowe, co-founder, ActualTech Media. “This presents an educational opportunity to help those companies understand that simple, affordable, enterprise-grade DRaaS solutions now exist.”

“Demand for DRaaS has been heating up and is expected to be a $20 billion market by 2020, but the current players are either focused on large enterprises or provide stripped-down versions for small businesses,” said Ken Shaw Jr., founder and CEO, Infrascale. “This study suggests that the market needs simple, secure, and affordable DR solutions. Given the financial impact of data theft and downtime on midsize enterprises, it’s crucial these businesses have enterprise protection.”

Data were weighted to be representative of the business populations of interest.

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