Gartner Disaster Recovery As A Service Recognizes Acronis

Hi, I am Mark Jameson, the General Manager of Disaster Recovery Business at Acronis.  I am a business person, not a marketing person.  So why have I decided to write a blog? Well, today I felt compelled to share my thoughts with you because something important has happened.

The inspiration for my writing urge comes from Gartner, the analyst firm trusted by all for its impartial and deep market and technology research. Gartner has for the first time ever published a Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service report, examining the IT disaster recovery (DR) vendors that deliver services with the cloud. Based on a large number of factors, Gartner plotted a select group of the 14 vendors on its Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service, and also distilled their assessment to a highly-compressed, very informative summary for each vendor in the report.

While I have been around data centers for my entire career, DR has been my business focus for the past decade.  I can claim that I know a thing or two about it. I have seen the early days, the legacy, and the transformation. And one question has never stopped boggling me: At the end of the day, how do customers select the right vendor when it comes to choosing IT solutions? Not only do buyers have many vendors to research, but there are also multiple use cases, and each one is a little different. Today’s businesses require a solution that fits your environment with as few tweaks as possible, causes little or no disruption, and seamlessly works with everything else you have in your data center. Cost adds a whole other dimension. But wait – there is more! Support and service, ease of use, availability of skills on the market, etc. It is a multi-dimensional matrix that CIOs need to solve. The Gartner report can help you make the right choice!

When it comes to DR, you cannot afford to select a solution that won’t work for you when needed. You cannot manage the weather, control the human factors, predict technology flops (I can think of one well-known O/S rollout), or other potentially-disruptive events. People who have been in IT for a while know that it’s not a matter of “if”, but “when” an outage or disaster will occur.

One thing you can control, however, is your ability to recover. Your ability to mitigate the risk, sustain as little damage as possible, and get back to business as fast as you can, will make all the difference. We have all seen sad cases when companies literally had to close their doors because of their inability to handle a single disaster. This is why I believe that choosing your disaster recovery solution is absolutely critical to the survival of your business.

Most IT professionals are pulled in many different directions and are not necessarily experts in server failovers, data replication, deduplication and compression. In fact, as is the case with SMB companies, very few organizations even have a person on staff responsible for that. And even if they do, will that person be available when the town is flooded, or a when hurricane hits.

So, how do customers make their choice, especially when it comes to IT continuity and disaster recovery? You cannot go and test all DR solutions out there.

And this is exactly why this Gartner report is important: it will make it easier for customers like you to understand the technology, learn the vendors, and ultimately make the right choice. I am very excited because it helps me as a vendor too – now I can just point at the quadrant and say, “Look – don’t take it from me. Take it from Gartner! They have already researched it.” How do I know it? Because the entire process of submitting this information to Gartner was a huge project in itself. Vendors had to answer 200+ questions – technical, business, financial, and marketing – before sending the response to Gartner for review. After that, Gartner applied a rigorous fact-checking process to validate and verify the answers. Vendors never had any influence on how Gartner processed the responses, and how they positioned the vendors. On top of that, each vendor had to provide five real-world, paying current customers.

I am excited that Acronis, with its Acronis Disaster Recovery Service, has done very well in this study. We are positioned as a “challenger” and we believe are the only one who is truly challenging the leaders. Only last year Acronis acquired nScaled, who since 2009 already established itself as a leader in Disaster Recovery as a Service (see how we did in another study by a different analyst firm in 2014). This key acquisition of nScaled demonstrates that Acronis, known to millions of users for its backup solutions, has a strategic vision for DR.

Now fully integrated with the Acronis AnyData Engine, the Acronis Disaster Recovery Service (previously available in US and UK only) is being rolled out worldwide.  By the way, I should mention that the Acronis Disaster Recovery Service not only provides full DR for your business continuity, it also provides full data protection with an all-in-one DR and backup solution!

Acronis is truly challenging the status quo! Our hybrid cloud Acronis Disaster Recovery Service offers you some unique features like guaranteed recovery time objective (RTO) of 15 minutes or less per server, push-button recovery automation, and scheduled non-disruption testing. We have taken the innovation of DR to a whole new level. Our “access anywhere” recovery console gives you the power to manage your local and remote DR environment in a very transparent, intuitive way, while our white-glove 24x7x365 support gives you the peace of mind of knowing that you will never deal with a disaster alone.

I am truly inspired with Gartner’s high acknowledgement of our technology and our customer’s loyalty. And this is why I wanted to share my excitement with you.

Now, without any further due, I invite you to read the Gartner’s report in its entirety, and at the same time learn more about Acronis Disaster Recovery Service today!

Get the Gartner report here. 

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This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Acronis

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