In today’s IT ecosphere, it’s now a well-known fact that cloud services are central to the future of organizations when it comes to managing the massive amounts of data they’re faced with in the age of digital business. It took a few years, but we are now moving past the skepticism phase and rapidly adopting cloud strategies. However, fear is no longer the issue for its adoption; instead, IT decision makers are asking themselves, “Where do I start?”

Getting off on the right foot
As with any new venture, helping your clients get off on the right foot is crucial to ensuring a wisely crafted strategy is successful. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is an agile, cost-efficient way to begin any journey to the cloud, as it securely takes a critical piece of data management off a CIO’s plate.

According to Gartner, by 2018, more organizations will be using DRaaS as opposed to traditional recovery services, making it one of the fastest-growing sectors in the cloud market. This means that organizations need a service provider that has the vision and the ability to help orchestrate the right resiliency solution across this mix of established and emerging technologies and services.

Implementing a DRaaS solution allows organizations to place critical production workloads and applications in cloud infrastructure for business continuity purposes, with the highly valuable proposition of avoiding capital expenses for recovery infrastructure and instead leveraging the economies of scale of cloud. Once an organization has successfully conducted failover testing, and feels comfortable with its DR solution in the cloud, the burden and intimidation of moving additional workloads to the cloud is eliminated. For that reason, DRaaS is regarded as the fastest on-ramp to cloud.

Determining an entry point to approach a cloud services strategy is a challenge; yet, starting with DRaaS will add a robust offering to your services portfolio and expand your customer base.

When disaster strikes, organizations count on IBM
When an unexpected disruption hits, IT disaster recovery is an organization’s top priority. No delays, no guesswork—they need a reliable solution that responds with speed and agility. Organizations want the kind of IT disaster recovery expertise that will safeguard their key business data, maintain productivity, and limit the financial losses that result from an outage. Organizations of all sizes across the globe rely on IBM for proven and cost-effective cloud disaster recovery solutions to get their business up and running in minutes—day or night.

With more than 40 years of experience in business resilience and information protection—and with resiliency centers around the globe—IBM offers a range of on-site, off-site and hybrid cloud-based data protection solutions. Recognized as a leader in the 2015 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service, IBM Resiliency Services help organizations safeguard their data without incurring capital expenses by providing centralized visibility, reporting and analytics through our storage portal website for streamlined backup and restore routines. IBM Cloud Managed Backup with Seagate helps protect our clients’ data according to our highest standards of reliability through experienced, industry experts, and their data is readily available when they need it, anytime anywhere. It automatically backs up and centralizes server data from across multiple sites and lines of business. It is cost effectively priced, and offers an ideal alternative solution with no capital expense to tape backup that’s in place today for many IBM System i customers.

IBM brings choices for organizations to quickly and efficiently respond to any disaster or outages. Not many organizations are aware an outage of less than 20 minutes can cost a company over USD1 million. How resilient are your clients?