What is the cost for one hour of downtime in today's digital world? Can a value be placed on applications or data that can't be recovered after an outage, or needs to be restored from days (or weeks) prior?

Before the advent of cloud computing, organizations were forced to implement disaster recovery by duplicating their infrastructure at remote locations and managing these separate, standby resources. These solutions were costly, requiring additional hardware, datacenter hosting fees, and IT labor -putting the desired level of capabilities out of reach for many organizations.

Today, Cloud based Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is a highly effective solution for enabling businesses to protect their data and applications.  DRaaS builds upon traditional backup capabilities to restore IT infrastructure in times of crisis, with little or no capital expenditure -enabling organizations of all sizes to afford the promise of getting back to business as usual with minimal interruption.

Service providers wanting to offer cloud based DRaaS have historically faced a challenging technical landscape, contrary to market expectations.  Challenges include:

• Managing the protection of hundreds (or thousands) of virtual machine replicas in a multi-tenant environment overwhelmed most tools.
• Private clouds are typically deployed deep in the enterprise network, behind the corporate firewall -complicating the connectivity needed to replicate systems and access to recovered systems in the event of a disaster or test.
• Periodic replication of uncompressed data consumes tremendous bandwidth. Often the organization lacked enough bandwidth to complete one replication cycle before another began.

To meet the diverse needs of customers, support the many cloud use cases, and scale efficiently, service providers needed better choices for their disaster recovery platform.  SPs must be able to protect locally hosted workloads, remote datacenter infrastructure, as well as private clouds on customer premises. Providers who can't protect workloads across today's "anywhere access" landscape face the loss of market share.

Comprehensive Solutions -Flexible Offerings

We are focused on bringing greater choice to our partners.  The flexibility of our Cisco Powered DRaaS enables them to deliver services and solutions from the vendors that best meet the needs of their customer base.  Cisco partners can extend their market reach by serving a wider target audience with a more diverse portfolio of services that include backup, DRaaS, backup+DRaaS, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)+backup+DRaaS, and a powerful portfolio of synergistic Cisco Powered services.  In this way, service providers can offer tiered protection so businesses can protect their entire organization the way they need, at the price they want.

In addition to requiring performance, reliability, and security, the Cisco Powered DRaaS designation requirements validate streamlined operations and an outstanding customer experience. Achieving the designation means the provider has self-service capabilities, secure support for multi-tenancy, and automation to help operations scale.  Advanced features include disaster recovery testing capabilities offering the ability test recoverability without disrupting production, satisfying an organization's compliance requirements.

Why Offer DRaaS?

The ability to offer Cisco Powered DRaaS with choice, compliance, and control also gives our service provider partners the opportunity to broaden their target market:

• Deliver services to SMBs profitably through lower touch sales and support.
• Service businesses with lower DR budgets that are willing to trade off price with tiered protection.
• Reach deeper into organizations by being able to protect more systems, including Hyper-V based sources, physical servers, and even other clouds.
• Offer greater flexibility than one-size-fits-all offerings through control of SLAs, storage characteristics, and testing frequency.

Cisco remains focused on not just what our partners need today, but what they and their customers need tomorrow.  As a market leader, Cisco recognizes the need to continuously adapt and is evolving the Cisco Powered Program to match the changing landscape.  By facilitating our partners' abilities to deliver these innovations, Cisco Powered DRaaS offerings will maintain their relevance by reflecting current market needs.

Register now for the June 29 webinar with Veeam and Cisco and learn more about how you can deliver Cisco Powered DRaaS - the industry's trusted choice for Disaster Recovery as a Service.