1 Management Summary
The KuppingerCole Market Compass provides an overview of a market segment and the vendors in that segment. It covers the trends that are influencing that market segment, how it is further divided, and the essential capabilities required of solutions. It also provides ratings of how well these solutions meet our expectations.
This Market Compass covers solutions that provide the backup, restore and disaster recovery of IT service data into the cloud in the context of the hybrid IT service delivery environment that is now commonly found in medium to large organizations. These solutions provide the capability to backup IT service data together with all the necessary meta data required to make it possible to restore an exact copy of the data together with its structure and permissions to achieve the required recovery objectives.
There is a mature market with many existing backup and disaster recovery solutions that support the protection of data in IT services delivered on premises by backing up data to physical media. However, the way in which IT services are delivered is changing as organizations move to a hybrid delivery model. This is leading to emerging markets for solutions that protect data in SaaS (Software as a Service) and IaaS (infrastructure as a Service) as well as for solutions that use cloud services to secure the backed-up data. Some cloud service users believe that the service itself provides all the continuity that they need. This may or may not be true, but it is up to the cloud customer to check that the service SLA meets their needs. However, there is now an emerging market for solutions that provide back-up protection for cloud service data.
Most of the existing vendors are adapting their solutions to this new model but most still have some way to go, especially in the area of SaaS. In addition, new vendors, including the cloud service providers themselves, are offering solutions covering their cloud as well as for storing data from on premises and other clouds. For SaaS, and especially for Microsoft Office 365, several new vendors now offer solutions for customers to back-up the data held in the SaaS services they use.
The essential capabilities that customers should look for in solutions must be aligned with their business requirements for service continuity. This includes considering how business critical the various systems and data are and hence the protection that is needed (recovery objectives). In general, where an organization is already using an existing solution for on-premises protection this will be preferred over adding other solutions, providing it meets their evolving business needs. Adding new solutions increases not only costs but also adds to the complexity of use and maintenance. However, in our research we see than some existing solutions on the market do not yet provide comprehensive coverage for the hybrid IT model. Where an existing solution does not meet the business requirements the organization should consider the new to market solutions if only as a stop gap.
