I am pleased to announce that the new Forrester Wave™: Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service Providers, Q2 2017 for infrastructure and operations professionals is now live! This Wave evaluation uncovered a market in which four providers — Sungard Availability Services, Bluelock, IBM, and iland — all emerged as Leaders, although their strengths differ. Another five providers — HPE Enterprise Services (now DXC Technology), Recovery Point, Plan B, Daisy, and TierPoint — are Strong Performers. NTT Communications is a Contender.

To evaluate these vendors, we developed a comprehensive set of criteria in three high-level buckets: current offering, strategy, and market presence. The criteria and their weightings are based on past research and user inquiries. In addition to typical user demands, this Forrester Wave™ evaluation also has a few thought-provoking criteria such as the provider’s capability to deliver security services, real-time views through a readiness score, automated change management, and orchestration-led enterprise application recovery.

If you are looking for a DRaaS provider or want to see how your current provider stacks up, this Forrester Wave is the best starting point for you. I know that your criteria for such a provider may differ. Hence, I recommend that you go beyond the Forrester Wave graphic and:

·         Download the Excel sheet associated with the graphic (Figure 2 in the report).

·         View the detailed product evaluations in the scoring guide.

·         Adapt the criteria weightings to fit your DR program’s needs and see your (potential) provider’s custom ranking.

If you would be willing to share your experiences selecting and implementing the services of these and other DRaaS providers, please let me know. Through my many client interactions, I have observed that I&O professionals engage with multiple DRaaS providers to gain 100% coverage of their technology environment. Do you do that? If so, I am curious to hear the factors that necessitate or motivate such a choice.

And if you would like Forrester’s help in selecting a DRaaS provider — for example, through analyst inquiry or advisory or through project consulting work — just say the word.