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Recovery-as-a-service (RaaS) is used to back up and restore data of an application, database, or storage system in case of damage due to a cyberattack, human error, or natural disaster.
RaaS is a form of outsourcing in-house data recovery, allowing organizations to experience the benefits of data recovery without having to dedicate IT resources to it.
See below to learn all about the RaaS market:
RaaS market
The RaaS market was estimated to be valued at $3.1 billion in 2020. It’s expected to maintain a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 35.8% from 2020 to 2027, reaching a value of $26.5 billion by the end of it.
The backup and recovery segment of the market is set to reach $9.3 billion by 2027, with a CAGR of 33.9%. The real-time data replication segment is forecast for a CAGR of 30.9%.
Regionally, the global market is segmented as follows:
- The U.S. market was estimated to be valued at $938.4 million in 2020, with a 30.2% share
- The Chinese market is forecast for a CAGR of 33.9%, reaching $4.3 billion by 2027
- Japan and Canada are forecast to grow at a CAGR of 32.2% and 30.6% over the forecast period
- Within Europe, Germany is projected to maintain one of the highest CAGRs at 24.4%
- The Asia-Pacific market, led by India, Australia, and South Korea, is set to reach $3.3 billion by 2027
By industry, the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sector is driving demand in the RaaS market.
Other notable industries in the market include:
- IT
- Telecommunications
- Retail and consumer goods
- Government
- Health care
- Media and entertainment
RaaS features
If an organization doesn’t have the IT resources to implement and manage its own backup and disaster recovery needs, it can outsource them to a third-party provider.
There are several types of recovery-as-a-service offerings, depending on a customer’s desired level of involvement in the process and expertise:
Fully managed RaaS
With fully managed RaaS offerings, the third-party service provider is responsible for the entirety of the backup and disaster recovery process, with little involvement on the customer’s end.
The service provider handles everything from protecting data infrastructure resources, both cloud and on-premises, performing regular DR testing to validate work operations and conducting recovery when necessary.
Assisted RaaS
Assisted RaaS offerings allow for more customer control and authority of the backup and disaster recovery process than fully managed services. However, few companies offer the service.
In the assisted model, the responsibilities are divided between the third-party service provider and the customer. In most scenarios, the RaaS provider acts as an adviser and supervisor, responsible for infrastructure and data replication, while the customer remains in charge of the integration, validation, and testing processes.
Self-managed RaaS
Self-managed RaaS offerings are the closest to a do-it-yourself solution. The service provider supplies a customer with the necessary information and tools to conduct and configure the backup and disaster recovery process.
This type requires the most involvement from the IT department, as they may need to construct some processes from scratch, such as data replication, data duplication, and data recovery scripts.
Benefits of RaaS
RaaS solutions offer a range of benefits to organizations using them, compared to relying solely on in-house expertise and resources.
Some notable benefits of RaaS offerings include:
- Frees up the IT team
- Pay-as-you-go subscription models
- Cost-effective
- Accelerates data recovery time
- Prompts recovery systems flexibility and scalability
- Boosts backup and recovery reliability
- Reduces redundancies
The importance of a data recovery plan
With customer data playing a primary role in companies, the cost of a data loss incident has also skyrocketed.
Surveys show that 93% of companies close within one year of experiencing a major data disaster, while 96% of businesses with a reliable disaster recovery plan were able to fully recover.
“Understanding your vulnerabilities, preparing for the worst and safeguarding against the risks is a business’ first line of defense,” according to a post at Diverse Services.
“A disaster recovery plan is a step-by-step plan that has documented a structured approach for responding to the disasters. Through business, as usual, taking onboard steps to identify the most critical IT services and data is the first step in planning.”
RaaS use cases
Disaster RaaS solutions in all 3 types can be adapted to fit the needs of individual organizations, from small businesses to megacorporations.
See the examples below that highlight how organizations in different industries are using RaaS solutions:
Mitel Networks Corporation
Mitel Networks Corporation is a provider of telecommunications and UCaaS services for over 70 million business users across 100 countries. It offers solutions ranging from public, private, and hybrid cloud communications to cloud-based network and telephone services.
Mitel worked to manage its sprawling IT environments and the massive amounts of siloed data they produce. Becoming more focused on their security, stability, and scalability, Mitel needed a way to secure its data.
Choosing to work with Google Cloud and RiverMeadow, a Premier Partner, Mitel acquired various cloud data storage, operations, and disaster recovery solutions.
“We wanted to leverage all of the Google Cloud services, like VM Snapshots, the operations suite, Cloud Storage, disaster recovery, and more,” says Rick Cirigliano, SVP of cloud operations, Mitel Networks.
“VMware Engine and Compute Engine presented an integrated approach to the non-production and production environment migrations we hoped to complete.”
With Google Cloud and their partner, Mitel scaled monthly operations 4x faster, accelerated the time to market for their services, and improved their security posture and disaster recovery capabilities.
Hyundai Heavy Industries
Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) is one of South Korea’s largest providers of shipbuilding, heavy equipment, machinery, and petroleum.
HHI has become a leader in manufacturing industrial robots, controllers, and cleaning robots.
Suffering from severe damages to their data centers after a 5.8 magnitude earthquake, the company sought a more reliable and resilient data backup and recovery solution.
Partnering with IBM Business Resiliency Services, HHI implemented a proactive response framework that covers their core systems, including a disaster recovery system and strategy.
“HHI chose to partner with IBM Business Resiliency Services for strategic disaster recovery operations based on the extensive experience that IBM has in regional and global disaster recovery,” says Jung Hun Seo, CIO, ICT Innovation Center at Hyundai Heavy Industries.
By partnering with IBM, HHI covered 292 application systems with IBM disaster RaaS solutions and established a disaster recovery center designed to withstand 7+ magnitude earthquakes.
NTT Netmagic
NTT Netmagic is part of the NTT Company and a leading managed hosting and hybrid cloud service provider in India.
They operate three research and development centers and 10 data centers across five Indian cities and offer their services to over 2,500 enterprise customers all over the country.
Being one of the region’s largest cloud service providers, NTT Netmagic needed a more stable, secure, and scalable data protection solution. They sought to solve their backup failures, long backup windows, and inefficient disaster recovery process.
Working with Commvault, NTT Netmagic deployed Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery across their data centers, in addition to Commvault Professional Services for their data migration.
“The deduplication and compression features with Commvault reduced storage consumption size by 35% and lowered storage costs by $300,000 annually,” says Ashwin Bhadra, assistant GM, product and services for backup, disaster recovery, and storage, NTT Netmagic.
“The rich features and cloud integration capability of Commvault has enabled us to embark on our hybrid cloud strategy, to be a data custodian and gain data-ready status across all services.”
With Commvault, NTT Netmagic was able to reduce its data backup window time from two days to eight hours and witnessed a 35%-40% improvement in resource management efficiency.
RaaS providers
Some of the leading providers of RaaS in the market include:
- Windstream
- Broadcom
- AWS
- Verizon
- IBM
- Microsoft
- Google Cloud
