C&W Business: DRaaS Product Overview and Analysis

See the full list of top DRaaS vendors

Bottom Line:

Most DRaaS providers are geared for businesses of a certain size. In the case of C&W Business, it focused on medium-complexity business sites, which often include Oracle DB, IBM I, AIX, x86, and fully managed services, although self-service is an option. This flexibility between managed and self-service is a key selling point, since businesses may switch between these two modes. Remaining with the same DRaaS provider is highly convenient. 

C&W like most DRaaS providers, also a geographical focus. Anyone in Florida, Central America, the Caribbean, Colombia and nearby countries desiring strong English and Spanish support should consider C&W.

Service Description:

C&W stresses automation of repetitive activities, monitoring, alarms, DR tests. It also stresses its ability to deal with mixed Windows, Linux, AIX, IBM i (formerly AS400), or Solaris environments, and any hypervisors. This includes DR expertise for SAP and Oracle databases.

Core services includes DRaaS for x86, DRaaS for Oracle, DRaaS for IBM Power p, and DRaaS for Power i.

C&W Business operates in over 20 countries in the Caribbean, Latin American and North American regions. Its customer support centers offer both Spanish and English interactions. Technical support services are also provided in both languages. The company operates as a subsidiary of Liberty Latin America.

Networking, connectivity, security, unified communications, collaboration, cloud, mobility, hospitality, and various SMB solutions.

Features:

Workloads Supported:

Physical and virtual x86, UNIX (AIX, Solaris), and IBM i.

Recovery Presence:

Miami, Cayman Islands; Panama (two), Curaçao, and Colombia (two).

Experience:

Up to 200+ server images.

Replication:

Replication to the cloud.

Failover:

Complete failover of x86, non-x86, and mixed environments.

Recovery time:

Less than three hours. C&W Business offers credits for SLA penalties after monthly availability is lower than 99.6% or their response time surpasses three hours.

Delivery:

Fully managed, although self-service is an option.

Security/encryption:

Data encrypted at rest and in flight.

Support:

24/7/365 support in Spanish and English. Onboarding completes in 14 days.

Key Markets and Use Cases:

Fully managed, medium complexity, mixed environments within its service area (especially those sites that include Oracle DB, and IBM i.

Pricing:

High.

For fully managed services, implementation and additional test fees listed by C&W Business are charged on a per-VM basis and are the highest of any vendor in this guide. However, all contracts do include three tests per year and localized service in Spanish and English.

C&W Summary: