Bluelock DRaaS: Features & Cost

See the full list of top DRaaS vendors

Bottom Line:

Bluelock differentiates itself with what it calls the Bluelock Experience, which is a consultative approach to help organizations with such things as onboarding, constituent alignment, recovery assurance, colocation recovery integration, and business goals. U.S.-based midsize and large companies needing guidance on DR and cloud strategy – and willing to pay more for it – are well served to consider Bluelock.

This very “hands on” approach – backed by Bluelock’s history as a IaaS and managed hosting provider – is an approach that serves clients well. The DR sector is highly complex and, as much as infrastructure itself, companies need advice and careful guidance.

Service Description:

Bluelock DRaaS is aimed mainly at midsized organizations who want resilient cloud services. The Bluelock Recovery Assurance program offers clients a DR service that is secure, tailored, supported and tested.

Services vary from DRaaS Run (minutes RTO), DRaaS Ready (hours RTO) and DRaaS Restore (hours to days RTO) depending on the network, storage and VM sizes. Each is delivered through Bluelock’s Recovery Assurance Methodology which features 100% test success. A roll back option for DRaaS Ready can bring the DR site online as a production site during an event.

Additional services: Additional managed services include Security Operation Center, Firewall, Load Balancers, IPS/IDS, antimalware, OS patching, to-tape or disk backup, full IaaS hosting, and a suite of security, automation, and digital transformation professional services.

Features:

Workloads supported:

Virtual x86, but it has integrated colocation capabilities for non-x86 workloads. Virtual, physical, VMware, Hyper-V, openstack, and non-intel servers.

Recovery presence:

Indianapolis, Indiana, and Las Vegas, Nevada.

Experience:

Up to 300 images in virtual environments.

Replication:

Bluelock leverages Zerto, Veeam, Carbonite and Commvault as standard replication tools that enable seconds to hours-based recovery times depending on the tier and tools chosen.

Full DR Playbook creation is included that encompasses multiple failover and testing scenarios, failover operations RACI, all failover and failback scenarios and technical requirements, in addition to a standard DR Runbook, which contains instructions for virtual machines.

Failover:

Failover to cloud via automated detection and recovery is available for priority workloads. Failback to client datacenter via automated detection and recovery is available for priority workloads.

Manually triggered failover is an option; automated recovery of DRaaS Run and Ready workloads is also available.

Recovery time:

15 minutes or less, 4 hours or less, 24 hours or less depending on the tier.

Delivery model:

Fully managed or assisted.

“Bluelock was a partner from the beginning. They were able to offer a solution to our complex hybrid requirements and support us through our entire process,” said a COO in the services industry.

Security:

All storage is encrypted. Encryption levels and data handling meets HIPAA HiTech, PCI, ITAR, FISMA, and other regulations. AES-256 encryption and various VPN encryption services used to protect data at rest and in flight. Note that clients are responsible for security monitoring and management of the virtual machines within their virtual data center during a failover event.

Support:

Has a 90+ Net Promoter Score (a metric of customer loyalty). Analyst surveys show customer satisfaction as a strong point, with zero turnover in customer-facing support staff reported for one year. User reviews are largely positive. They report excellent support for low- and medium-complexity architectures.

“Pros: Process-driven execution was hands on throughout implementation and post support; it also provided well-developed DR Playbook templates. Cons: Slow adoption of newer software updates for Vmware and Zerto,” said a utility CIO.

Key Markets and Use Cases:

U.S. mid-sized companies that desire a business-related, high-touch approach toward DRaaS and have heterogeneous workloads that require not only colocation, but also integration into a recovery plan.

Pricing:

High.

Pricing is dependent on level of management, recovery speed, environment size and configurations. Otherwise, Bluelock refused to disclose prices and there was nothing available online as a reference quote. Therefore, expect Bluelock to be a pricier than many of the other solutions covered in this guide due to a more hands-on approach.

Bluelock Summary: