It’s interesting to look back over the predictions about the direction the backup and disaster recovery (BDR) space would take this decade. In the fall of 2019, when the industry was making plans for the year ahead, no one knew we’d face overwhelming challenges. The year brought a pandemic, stay-at-home orders, a rapid transition to remote work, increased cyberattack activity, and natural disasters that severely impacted regions of the United States. Although some IT sales slowed or stagnated due to these crises, BDR offered managed services providers (MSPs) and value-added resellers (VARs) potential for growth. Moreover, the BDR trends we observed moving into 2020 continued to gain momentum and evolved in response to businesses’ challenges. Consider these BDR trends in your planning for the coming years.
1Multicloud
More businesses realize they aren’t limited to using one cloud. A multicloud strategy provides an easy path to redundancy for data backups, enabling companies to choose clouds (and cloud pricing) that suit specific needs. For example, businesses and organizations in healthcare or financial services must comply with regulatory requirements for storing sensitive data. With a multicloud strategy, they can choose a cloud certified to comply with those requirements while using different clouds for other data, providing greater control over cloud costs.
The trend of using multiple clouds is significant. Grand View Research estimates the global multicloud management market will grow at a 26.3 percent CAGR from 2021 to 2028 to reach $32.75 billion.
2DRaaS
Adoption of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), which replicates a business’ physical or virtual services to provide failover during a crisis, continues to increase. DRaaS eliminates the burden of DR from in-house IT and also ensures that businesses with mission-critical operations in the cloud can get the recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO), and other service levels they need. Additionally, clouds designed for DRaaS offer seamless integration with backup appliances and solutions.
DRaaS adoption will increase in the coming years. MarketsandMarkets.com research indicates the global DRaaS market will grow to $14.6 billion by 2025, a 23.3 percent CAGR.
3Backup for Mobile Users
With the increase in operations supported through mobile devices, MSPs and VARs may find opportunities to create backup solutions for mobile platforms and desktop operating systems. For example, an EC-Council blog points out that ensuring your clients can restore mobile data after a disaster can add value to the solutions you provide.
It may also be beneficial for your clients to consider backing up data from Internet of Things (IoT) systems that they use or plan to deploy.
4Automation
Automating backup and disaster recovery is another BDR trend to watch. Of course, scheduling and backing up data automatically will continue. Still, the role automation plays will expand with artificial intelligence (AI) to prioritize data during recovery, archive or delete data based on relevance and keep data safe by detecting and stopping malicious behavior.
BDR Trends that Persist
As technology advances and businesses’ networks expand in functionality and geography, BDR solutions will grow more complex. Additionally, as companies continue to adapt to remote workforces, some for the long term, they will require new BDR strategies to keep all of their data secure and accessible.
Businesses will need MSPs and VARs with expertise, including current and emerging BDR trends, to help them ensure that their solutions are configured, tested and monitored adequately. Providing these services allows you to add value by giving BDR the required attention. You’ll also enable them to devote more of their attention to their core businesses and have the assurance that, if disaster strikes, you’ll help them quickly get operations running again.
