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DRaaS Magic Quadrant shrinks; Microsoft, iland lead the way

Gartner’s 2018 Magic Quadrant for disaster recovery as a service made 13 vendors disappear.

Gartner also thoroughly shuffled the deck among the remaining DRaaS Magic Quadrant survivors. Besides shrinking from 23 entrees in 2017 to 10 in 2018, the leaders quadrant dropped from five last year to two in the 2018 DRaaS Magic Quadrant.

Only iland remained in the top group from 2017, with Microsoft moving up from a visionary in 2017 to the other 2018 leader. IBM and Sungard Availability Services went from 2017 leaders to 2018 visionaries, and Recovery Point went from leader to challenger. The other 2017 leader, Infrascale, dropped out of the 2018 DRaaS Magic Quadrant completely.

The main reason for the reduced field is a change in the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The goals of the Magic Quadrant this year included providing more of a focus on helping to answer the question “If I want DRaaS and only DRaaS, which providers are the most relevant?” As a result, Gartner dropped many major data protection players.

All vendors that sell exclusively through the channel — such as Unitrends and Datto — were left off the DRaaS Magic Quadrant, said Mark Thomas Jaggers, director of research and advisory services and lead author of the report. The other vendors dropped are Acronis, Axcient, Carbonite, Daisy, Databarracks, Evolve IP, Flexential (previously Peak 10), Infrascale, NTT Communications, Quorum and StorageCraft.

Gartner also dropped providers who had customers mostly with annual revenue of less than $50 million or did not have a large enough focus on DRaaS offerings.

There were no new vendors added to the 2018 DRaaS Magic Quadrant – all those that made it were also in the 2017 edition.

The leaders can scale quickly on demand and are taking “an aggressive approach in expansion,” Jaggers said. “They are growing and adding new features and new locations.”

Cost a key factor in DRaaS market

The DRaaS Magic Quadrant praised iland for its pricing, its online community for sharing best practices and its compliance team. Iland’s portfolio includes the iland Secure Cloud, iland Secure Disaster Recovery as a Service and iland Secure Cloud Backup.

“In the past 12 months, it has expanded its geographic presence, added new fully managed support offerings and expanded the platforms it can support through the use of additional service delivery partners,” the report said.

The other leader, Microsoft, provides DRaaS through its Azure Site Recovery (ASR).

“In the past year, Microsoft has improved its ASR cloud-to-cloud protection roadmap and improved its install experience by offering a new virtual-based appliance approach,” the report said. “… Gartner believes Microsoft will continue to invest heavily in ASR because the same service underpinnings are also being leveraged for its migration services.”

Microsoft also received high marks for its competitive pricing and “significant global reach and service consistency, which is scalable for the future.”

Rounding out the DRaaS Magic Quadrant, TierPoint is a challenger and Bluelock, C&W Business, Expedient and CloudHPT are niche players.

DRaaS is now a “mainstream offering,” according to Gartner, with the research firm estimating it to be a $2.4 billion worldwide business, expected to reach $3.73 billion by 2021.

Jaggers said he has seen pricing improvement year over year, and expects that will continue.

“There is a lot of competition,” he said.

Many of the DRaaS providers didn’t have a clear vision around the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and data privacy laws, Jaggers said, but he expects that element to improve as customers become more aware of the regulations.

Gartner defines DRaaS providers as managing server image and production data replication to the cloud, disaster recovery run book creation, automated server recovery within the cloud, automated server failback from the cloud, and network element and functionality configuration.

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