Storage as a service growing among Tier 1s

Last week’s Qwest announcement and ongoing work by the likes of AT&T and Verizon demonstrate that disaster recovery and business continuity might be a way to stop erosion of margins in communications. More than an Amazon or Rackspace, it is the operators that can offer smaller businesses the most bang for their buck in terms of what can be layered on top of existing hosted and managed services. For that reason, storage as a service is growing among Tier 1s.

“Disaster recovery and business continuity are the ‘sweet spots’ for telcos, which have the relationships, so when businesses need recovery or archiving, telcos have the ability to layer on top extra bandwidth, additional lines, or voicemail and additional services so that businesses have an all-in-one bundle of solutions and services at a reasonable cost,” said Joshua Geist, CEO of Geminare, whose Cloud Storage Assurance 2.0 solution is white-labeled with service providers such as Qwest and Bell Canada. He says that the most-often cited use cases for cloud are DR/BC for development, testing and backup purposes.

Geist believes DR/BC programs are gong to continue to come into the limelight as small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) grapple with the cost and staffing for adequate backups. Indeed, disk-to-disk and tape systems for backing up financial information, research, drawings, sales quotes and other important information can be unwieldy and costly when it involves infrastructure investment and skilled resources. Lack of diligence in backing up and mirroring accurately existing information and data can quickly result in a domino effect that costs more than it saves.

As a result, operators are trying to leverage what they have in terms of systems and expertise to help their enterprise customers accommodate long-term outages where critical business operations have to be sustained. Any disaster that lasts several days can significantly impact revenue and perception of a brand, especially when media hypes the results of pandemics, terrorism or regional outages. As enterprises worry, these operators are doing more to optimize what they can do for their customers with DR/BC programs.

Last year, for example, AT&T held its largest-ever network disaster recovery exercise at Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in Washington, D.C. It had developed structures that could, for example, handle IP traffic for an entire city during a disaster.
As enterprises evaluate different service providers’ models and solutions, cloud computing and software-based solutions that require no infrastructure investment are coming to the fore.

“There’s a lot of research that shows most businesses are not protected enough or at all — especially smaller and medium-sized companies strapped for resources. They have a substantial reliance on technology to operate, and that increases every year. As their online presence increases, it is shown their disaster-recovery planning doesn’t grow with it,” said Eric Bozich, vice president of product management for Qwest.

As a result of this issue, Qwest has recently partnered with Geminare to launch its “Real-Time Application Recovery,” a cloud-based disaster recovery service it hopes will help SMBs or larger companies looking to protect certain departments or facets of their organizations. “Because messaging and databases are mission critical for businesses now, we are providing data center diversity, geographic and network redundancy, and infrastructure for times when a company’s workforce cannot come in and keep the business up and running,” Bozich said. Unlike the majority of other cloud services, Qwest will focus on helping enterprises based on Microsoft Office Exchange with its new offering, he added.

“We want to reach out to enterprise customers we otherwise wouldn’t have without cloud — those who don’t want to lease space or buy hardware,” Bozich said. “Those who just want to sign up for the service and add some software to their environment and then their messaging platform is copied into the cloud and if there is a failure, the messaging infrastructure in the cloud takes over. This is a ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ type of convenience for smaller companies.”

About 35% of organizations that participated in a Nemertes’ 2010 benchmark indicated they possess only one data center. They indicated also that cloud-based storage is a viable component of a BC/DR plan if there are guarantees of protecting the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data in the cloud.

As more software and infrastructure, whether through partnerships or homegrown solutions, is put into service provider environments, the potential to replicate infrastructure such as servers and storage farms will make operators even more attractive for cloud-based DR/BC programs.