Business continuity, Content, Storage

Gartner Magic Quadrant DRaaS 2016 Report

Within the IT channel, disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) has gone mainstream – particularly with MSPs that offer business continuity services. Numerous cloud service providers (CSPs) offer DRaaS platforms to channel partners. But the options for channel partners and/or end-customers don’t end there. Gartner Inc. in June 2016 published its latest Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS). Overall, the Gartner Magic Quadrant DRaaS report included 20 companies. The providers are organized into four quadrants:
  1. Niche Players
  2. Visionaries
  3. Challengers
  4. Leaders
Here's a look look at the DRaaS companies in each quadrant, along with their various strengths and cautions, according to Gartner.

Quadrant: Niche Players


1. Carbonite (EVault)

Carbonite acquired EVault to extend from the SMB cloud backup market into the midmarket DRaaS opportunity. As of mid-2016, the company was ramping up its partner program and preparing EVault enhancemens. Here's a look a the Strengths and Cautions that Gartner memtioned: Strengths
  • Guaranteed service tiers, with corresponding RTO- and RPO-based service-level targets, are available from Carbonite (EVault).
  • Virtual CPU and storage capacity can be overprovisioned to 15% beyond the allocated capacity at no extra charge.
  • Daily data integrity checking is performed by Carbonite (EVault's) service management software.
  • Carbonite (EVault's) language support is the most extensive of all the providers in this Magic Quadrant.
Cautions
  • Because EVault Cloud Disaster Recovery is primarily provider-managed, few service manageability tools for customers are supported.
  • Carbonite (EVault's) operations control compliance with regulations, such as PCI, Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) and International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), is limited.
  • Provider portal functionality for most service tiers (except for the one-hour SLA tier) is limited with Carbonite (EVault).
  • Reference customers for Carbonite (EVault) cited a need for improvement in the areas of account management and professional services.
ChannelE2E says: Carbonite has a growing channel partner program. Find it here.

2. Databarracks

The strengths and challenges for Databarracks, according to Gartner, include... Strengths:
  • All Databarracks' customers have a commercial account manager from the sales team, a technical account manager, and escalation paths to the Service Delivery Management team.
  • Databarracks' flexible compute and storage capacity management processes facilitate ease of resource bursting.
  • Databarracks allows clients to test as many times as they want during a year without additional cost.
  • Rapid failover times are supported by Databarracks for both virtual servers (15 minutes or less) and physical servers (30 minutes or less).
Cautions
  • Service delivery is geographically focused, and Databarracks currently serves only U.K. customers. It does support some customers' international offices. Currently, all interfaces and documentation are provided in English only.
  • Databarracks has limited experience with hybrid recovery configuration support. Additionally, it received a low customer reference score for support for both physical and virtual servers and systems.
  • Databarracks is hesitant to provide proofs of concept (POCs) for prospects and, in addition, requires payment upfront for onboarding new client projects.
  • Databarracks requires that any resources used above the reservation are paid for on a pay- as-you-go basis of five-minute increments.
ChannelE2E says: Although we haven't communicated directly with Databarracks, we found partner program information here.

3. Evolve IP

Evolve IP strengths and cautions mentioned by Gartner included... Strengths
  • Evolve IP's hosting centers are major Tier 4 data centers. Customers can connect via Evolve IP's provided network, Customer Cross Connect, Public Internet, Public Internet with VPN and Evolve IP's internet bonding option, Cloud Connect.
  • Customers have 100% self-service management visibility over their image replication and failovers from either VMware- or Hyper-V-based VMs, as well as Windows and Linux physical servers and Veeam.
  • The Evolve IP operations team runs daily sandbox failover tests to ensure that customer systems can be correctly activated and are fully functional following a failover.
  • Evolve IP's portfolio extends beyond DRaaS, so it may be of interest to clients looking for one cloud provider across servers, storage, desktops, communications and networks.
Cautions
  • Service delivery is geographically focused, and Evolve IP currently has revenue exclusively in the North American market. Currently, all interfaces and documentation are provided in English only.
  • Evolve IP has limited experience with hybrid recovery configuration support.
  • An Evolve IP solution would require additional replication customization if a customer wishes to replicate an existing EMC SAN at the storage level.
  • The opportunities for service improvement cited by some Evolve IP reference customers include service cost-effectiveness, onboarding process and problem resolution timeliness.
ChannelE2E says: We heard from Evolve IP pretty regularly, and you can find partner program information here.

4. Peak 10

Peak 10 strengths and cautions, as determined by Gartner, include... Strengths
  • Peak 10's data centers and cloud infrastructure have been certified for PCI DSS Version 2.0 Level 1 and HIPAA compliance.
  • Peak 10 prospects can review any and all facility and operations audit results under a nondisclosure agreement and through a controlled portal.
  • Customers of Peak 10 can configure multiple virtual protection groups at multiple data centers.
  • A wide range of supporting security services are available to Peak 10's customers, ranging from basic firewalling to a managed compliance bundle.
Cautions
  • Although service delivery is expanding nationwide, the majority of Peak 10's production customers are located in the eastern half of the United States.
  • Peak 10 does not currently support unlimited usage of its cloud service. Cloud usage is limited to recovery exercising and post-declaration recovery operations.
  • Opportunities for improvement that were cited by reference customers include service innovation, service cost-effectiveness and breadth of its professional services quality.
ChannelE2E says: Find Peak 10 partner program information here.

Continue to page 2 of 4 to see companies in the Visionaries quadrant

Quadrant: Visionaries

Welcome to page 2 of 4 of our Gartner Magic Quadrant DRaaS report coverage. Here, we look at companies in the Visionaries quadrant. They include...

1. Datto

Perhaps best known for its MSP-centric partner program, Datto's strengths and cautions, according to Gartner, include: Strengths:
  • Datto's Inverse Chain technology decouples data retention planning from backup management, allowing customers to delete unneeded backups and still have instant access to any remaining backup points.
  • Datto's "one call to engineer" allows customers to be instantly connected to a trained Datto technician located in either the U.S. or the U.K. 24/365 — with one phone call and no after- hours surcharges.
  • A significant engineering team and channel partner approach allows Datto to remain focused on its core competencies, while allowing partners to provide customized management and professional services.
  • Compared with other DRaaS providers in this Magic Quadrant whose services are an extension of managed backup, Datto has significantly larger revenue and a larger global presence. The latter is in part due to its 2013 acquisition of Paradeon Technologies that expanded its EMEA presence.
Cautions
  • Datto is positioned more as a provider that enables MSPs to deliver DRaaS to end users. Consequently, capabilities such as automated DR playbooks or recovery-specific professional services will be specific to individual MSP partners. However, Datto does assist every new customer with the creation of a DR plan.
  • Datto's SLAs are limited to support "response time." Datto does not have specific SLAs regarding recovery, uptime guarantees, data center rollovers or planned emergency maintenance.
  • Despite claims of customer satisfaction related to the one-call-to-engineer support approach, referenced customers rated the services only average with respect to service quality and quality of technical support.
  • Although Datto services 400 customer failovers per month, Datto does not manage disaster declarations to the same extent as some of the other providers in this Magic Quadrant.
ChannelE2E says: Datto is focused like a laser on MSP relationships, and has launched a range of lead generation programs that funnel potential customers directly to MSPs. Find partner program information here.

2. Infrascale

Next up is Infrascale, with the following strengths and cautions from Gartner. Strengths
  • Its 15-minute RTO service levels are among the lowest in the industry. Infrascale's solution currently supports push-button failover for the following source platforms: Windows-on-metal, Linux-on-metal, VMware vSphere and Hyper-V. In addition, backup and recovery support is also provided for the IBM System i, HP-UX and IBM AIX.
  • Double-blind encryption, whose keys are known only to the customer, is attractive to banks, hospitals and government entities, especially when coupled with accreditations, such as ITAR, FISMA, HIPAA, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) Level 1, the Criminal Justice Information Security (CJIS) Policy and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA).
  • Infrascale received high satisfaction scores from its reference customers for service quality, quality of technical support, timeliness of provider support response and service problem resolution, and secure operations.
Cautions
  • Opportunities for improvement, as provided by Infrascale's reference customers, include the effectiveness of its service management portal and account management quality.
  • Currently, Infrascale does not support configurations that contain hundreds of in-scope servers.
  • Support for storage controller, SAN-to-SAN or logical unit number (LUN)-based replication is not provided for those customers who have such a requirement.
  • Infrascale's geographic spread for its size could introduce delivery capability risks for clients in Asia/Pacific or Latin America, should the current growth trajectory continue.
ChannelE2E says: Infrascale positions itself as a partner-first company. Find partner program information here.

3. NTT Communications

Known for its global presence and reach, NTT's strengths and cautions include, according to Gartner... Strengths:
  • NTT Com's DRaaS portal is highly functional and easy to use.
  • NTT Com's DRaaS service supports virtual and physical servers in multiple geographies, which facilitates global support for hybrid configurations. NTT Com's customers are entitled to unlimited failover and recovery testing at no additional cost.
  • Reference customers ranked NTT Com's service highly for secure operations, quality of professional services, account management and the utility of the provider's service portal.
Cautions
  • POC pilots are supported by NTT Com as the initial phase of production implementation.
  • Because customer RTOs and RPOs are customizable in the DRaaS portal, it is the responsibility of NTT Com's customers to monitor their service-level compliance.
  • Reference customers cited the need for improvement in both the flexibility of NTT Com's service contracts, as well as in the initial service onboarding process.
  • Customers must request missed monthly service-level credits.
ChannelE2E says: We're not sure if NTT Communications offers a channel program for its DRaaS platform, but you can find information about the offering here.

4. Unitrends

Strengths:
  • Unitrends owns its cloud infrastructure and VM replication technology and therefore isn't reliant on third parties for innovation.
  • Customers can also add Unitrends' ReliableDR as a recovery assurance mechanism to automate the testing of their DR environment in the cloud to guarantee recovery.
  • Guaranteed one-hour RTO service levels are supported.
  • Unitrends received a number of high customer reference scores, including for secure operations, service quality, effectiveness of service onboarding process, service cost- effectiveness and quality of professional services.
Cautions:
  • Service delivery is geographically focused in the U.S. market. The Unitrends Cloud business only recently expanded beyond the U.S., with the launch of data centers in Canada, Germany, the U.K. and Australia. As such, the majority of Unitrends' DRaaS production instances are in the U.S., and all documentation and software interfaces are currently only in English.
  • In comparison with other providers in this Magic Quadrant, Unitrends' experience with directly managing disaster declarations and operations failbacks was much more limited.
  • Operations of additional hardware (for example, firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, intrusion detection systems and tunnel terminators) that are required to support recovery exercising or post-declaration recovery operations must be managed by the service customer.
  • Unitrends Recovery Assurance, a service feature that provides automated testing of recovery from backups, archives and replication, is incrementally priced at $50 per supported VM.
ChannelE2E says: Find Unitrends partner program information here.

Continue to page 3 of 4 to see companies in the Challengers quadrant

Quadrant: Challengers

Welcome to page 3 of 4 of our Gartner Magic Quadrant DRaaS report coverage. Here, we look at companies in the Challengers quadrant. They include...

1. Acronis

Also known for its channel program and close work with Cloud Services Providers (CSPs), here's a look at strengths and challenges, according to Gartner. Strengths
  • Acronis has strong experience in the support of hybrid recovery configurations. Acronis' run books are easy to build and are fully automated.
  • Acronis' recovery testing is flexible and allows nondisruptive automated test activation and scheduling in a segregated environment.
  • Acronis received a high reference customer satisfaction score for service quality.
Cautions
  • Acronis has limited experience with managing configurations that exceed 200 server nodes.
  • In contrast to the automatic intracloud replication supported by some providers, Acronis' clients have the optional ability to replicate from the protected client location to multiple Acronis sites. In the event of a major disruption at the primary Acronis service delivery data center, the client can orchestrate failover to the alternative data center. The clients can also request Acronis to assist with failovers at the alternative location. This approach has been taken to limit the operations' impact across multiple Acronis data center targets.
  • Currently, Acronis' regulatory compliance, in addition to Statements on Standards for Attestation Engagements (SSAE) No. 16, is limited to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA).
  • Opportunities for improvement that were cited by Acronis reference customers include service cost-effectiveness and service contract flexibility.
ChannelE2E says: Acronis has been working with hundreds of cloud service providers (CSPs), and the company's management team previously helped to launch the cloud services brokerage wave while building Parallels. Find Acronis partner program information here.

2. Recovery Point

Strengths
  • Recovery Point is well-positioned to support heterogeneous configurations that contain combinations of VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V and Open Virtual Format (OVF) VMs, as well as IBM AIX logical partitions (LPARs), IBM iSeries LPARs and mainframe z/VM, Linux on z Systems and z/OS LPARs. As such, it is one of only a few providers with years of experience supporting large complex data center configurations.
  • Recovery Point received high satisfaction scores from its reference customers for secure operations, service quality and quality of technical support. Some of this satisfaction is attributed to the fact that it does not oversubscribe its facility space and that the services are concurrently maintainable — allowing it to provide a 100% uptime guarantee without the need for maintenance window exceptions.
  • Recovery Point's private network infrastructure functions as a national network hub with the ability to cross-connect inexpensively to more than 700 WAN providers.
  • The sales cycle is hands-on. It involves credentialed technicians and network assessments to help ensure a low cost of ownership, as well as POC implementations to prove the viability of a complex solution.
Cautions
  • Recovery Point designed its portal to provide customers ready access to all of the native analysis and reporting features available from the underlying software or hardware DRaaS enabling technologies — instead of providing consolidated views and functionality. Consequently, customer references did not rate the service portal very highly, including the portal attributes of simplicity, utility, and effectiveness in supporting service quality and costs.
  • Reference customers also found Recovery Point to be slightly behind larger and more established competitors with respect to service feature innovation.
  • Service availability is currently limited to the U.S.
ChannelE2E says: We're not sure if Recovery Point has a traditional channel partner program, but the company does have strategic relationships with Equinix and Serius Computer Solutions, among others.

3. TierPoint

Strengths
  • TierPoint has many data protection/backup services available to accommodate customers' needs — from the most basic on-site data survivability to much more robust, near-real-time SAN-based and host-based replication technologies. In addition, TierPoint can accommodate off-site tape rotation to third parties upon request.
  • The self-service option includes unlimited testing and failover capabilities.
  • The Cloud to Cloud recovery product allows customers the ability to run either full or selective DR testing as needed, without incurring an additional cost.
  • TierPoint received high marks from customer references for account management, having been in the business for 15 years and having continued to invest its expansion with 11 acquisitions in the past five years.
Cautions
  • Currently, TierPoint commits to having customers' servers available to customers via the cloud portal within 15 minutes of failover request and initiation for up to 10 VMs and an additional 10 VMs every 15 minutes.
  • Improvement opportunities cited by TierPoint's customer references include the effectiveness of the service onboarding process and service portal utility, simplicity and effectiveness for tracking both service delivery quality and ongoing service cost.
  • TierPoint's experience with managing customer disaster declarations was more limited than that of several other providers in this Magic Quadrant.
  • Today, the TierPoint DRaaS solution is available only in the U.S.
ChannelE2E says: We're not aware of a TierPoint partner program, but you can gain some clues about the company's underlying technology by checking its partner page. We wonder if the service is actually built atop Carbonite EVault...

4. Verizon

Strengths
  • Verizon has a broad range of VM and related production data replication mechanisms.
  • Verizon's Premise to Cloud DRaaS customers can burst as much additional CPU and RAM as they need, to support an actual disaster declaration, at no extra charge.
  • Verizon received a high overall reference customer satisfaction score for its support organization's responsiveness, timeliness of service problem resolution and professional services quality.
  • has a large professional services organization with significant business continuity and IT DR project management and implementation experience.
Cautions
  • Verizon's Premise to Cloud DRaaS customers typically have one test per year as part of the standard contract. However, customers can require that additional tests are supported as part of their DR contract with Verizon. It does not apply to the new cloud-to-cloud DRaaS service, in which customers can self-provision and self-test the DR environments.
  • Because of the demand for provider-managed services from the enterprise customers that Verizon serves, DRaaS is largely a provider-managed service. Use of management portal capabilities is generally limited to internal Verizon staff and available for customers using the new Verizon's cloud-to-cloud DRaaS service.
  • Because Premise to Cloud DR is a provider-managed service, there is limited integration between Verizon's DRaaS management system and the service customers' IT management utilities; however, this is by design to maintain compliance and to allow the customers to retain full management accountability for their security environment.
  • Reference customers cited the need for Verizon to improve its operations security and end- user privacy management.
ChannelE2E says: Verizon has been mulling the potential sale of its cloud data centers, though we don't know if that potential move has implications for the company's DRaaS. Also, we don't know if there's a partner program for the service. Still, you can find Verizon DRaaS information here.

5. VMware

Strengths
  • VMware's service pricing is straightforward and easy to understand. A range of technical support is provided by VMware, including 24/365 support for Severity 1 issues.
  • The length of a vCloud Air contract term can be as little as one month.
  • The vCloud Air service supports a broad level of regulatory compliance, including ISO 27001, SSAE 16 (SOC 1, SOC 2 and SOC 3), HIPAA, and
  • Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act.
Cautions:
  • Because of its current support focus on just VMware environments, direct support does not exist for data center configurations that include Hyper-V, Xen, Kernel-based VM (KVM) or Open Virtualization Format (OVF).
  • However, VMware has partnered with RackWare to provide software for replication of either Hyper-V or nonvirtualized workloads into vCloud Air. Support for hybrid recovery configurations is limited.
  • To date, VMware has somewhat limited experience with supporting customers' disaster declarations.
  • Reference customers cited that VMware's service contracts could be more flexible.
ChannelE2E says: VMware continues to accelerate its overall channel partner program, and you can find more details about VMware's DRaaS offerings here.

Continue to page 4 of 4 to see companies in the Leaders quadrant

Quadrant: Leaders

Welcome to page 4 of 4 of our Gartner Magic Quadrant DRaaS report coverage. Here, we look at companies in the Leaders quadrant. They include...

1. Axcient

After starting in the SMB channel, Axcient has recently pushed hard into the midmarket and enterprise with a new platform called Axcient Fusion. Here are Gartner's views on strengths and challenges. Strengths
  • Axcient's per-server or per-virtual-host pricing is simple and all-inclusive, and its self-service model makes its pricing competitive.
  • Administration of Axcient's GUI is simple and easy to use.
  • Currently, 70% of Axcient's production configurations are hybrid (that is, support a mix of both physical and virtual servers).
  • Reference customers ranked Axcient highly in service quality, secure operations and service cost-effectiveness.
Cautions
  • Axcient remains primarily the provider of a self-service DRaaS solution. Customers requiring a broader range of management services can turn to Axcient's large partner community.
  • While Axcient does have a rapidly growing professional services organization, its size is not yet that of several of the other provider participants.
  • Axcient has limited direct experience with production customers in the large-enterprise segment. Currently, only 10% of Axcient's installed base is made up of organizations with more than 1,000 employees.
  • Currently, all interfaces and documentation are provided in English only.
ChannelE2E says: Axcient recently pivoted from the SMB market toward enterprise and midmarket opportunities. We don't know if Gartner's research reflects that pivot. Find Axcient partner program information here.

2. Bluelock

Strengths
  • Bluelock received the highest reference customer satisfaction scores among all providers in this Magic Quadrant.
  • Bluelock has strong professional services and robust onboarding, training and run book development processes, which are demonstrated through its Recovery Assurance Program.
  • Bluelock Portfolio allows customers to track and manage service costs and recovery objectives, schedule tests, and access run book documentation as well as past test validation certificates.
  • Support for both intracloud and intercloud hybrid recovery configurations is available with Bluelock.
Cautions
  • Because of the demand for provider-managed services among its customer base, Bluelock DRaaS is largely a managed service.
  • Service delivery is geographically focused in North America.
  • No support is currently in place from Bluelock for bare-metal restore of non-VMware servers or storage area network (SAN)-to-SAN VM replication.
  • Little integration with on-premises management utilities (apart from vCenter and vCloud Director) is supported by Bluelock.
ChannelE2E says: Bluelook appears to be an MSP that has pieced together multiple third-party platforms (Cisco, Veeam, VMware, Zerto, etc.) into a DRaaS platform. Check out the company's strategic partners here.

3. IBM

Strengths:
  • IBM offers one of the most comprehensive sets of related professional and managed services of any of the providers in this Magic Quadrant.
  • IBM has a solid provider portal interface in place for configuring a virtual recovery data center, recovering servers, and monitoring testing progress and completion.
  • IBM has one of the highest percentage of supported hybrid configurations of any of the assessed providers.
  • IBM received high customer reference scores in a number of areas, including secure operations, service quality, quality of technical support, timeliness of provider support response and service problem resolution, and support for both physical and virtual servers and systems.
Cautions
  • IBM's DRaaS offering may not be the appropriate choice for cost-conscious organizations looking for a self-managed service.
  • IBM's recurring monthly service pricing for VMs and the supporting storage can command a premium over other providers.
  • Although IBM's service audit results are proprietary due to its need to maintain examination confidentiality, service customers can, and do, request their own third-party audit to fulfill their compliance requirements.
  • Reference customers cited the need for improved support within the provider's portal for reporting service quality and service cost, as well as improvements in service billing transparency.
ChannelE2E says: Find IBM DRaaS information here, though we don't know if or how IBM PartnerWorld members can leverage the service.

4. iland

Strengths
  • Iland's service uptime availability SLA is currently 100%.
  • Target response times for all iland customers' questions and incident reports is 15 minutes or less.
  • Customers of iland can test operations failover and failback without restrictions at no additional charge.
  • received high customer reference scores in a number of areas, including effectiveness of onboarding process, secure operations, service quality, quality of technical support, quality of professional services and service feature innovation.
Cautions
  • The establishment and management of iland user groups have largely been informal up to this point.
  • Iland has limited experience with hybrid recovery configuration support. Perimeter network security protection, intrusion monitoring and security management processes were not as well-defined by iland as by other providers in this Magic Quadrant.
  • Reference customers cited that iland can improve in the area of contract flexibility.
ChannelE2E says: iland resembles an MSP, having built its DRaaS offerings atop Zerto and Veeam.

5. Microsoft

Plenty of channel partners are trying to figure out how they can monetize the Azure cloud. DRaaS could be one answer. Here's a look at Gartner's views on strengths and cautions Strengths:
  • Microsoft is uniquely positioned to provide customers converged data and availability solutions within a hyperscale cloud (that is, Azure). Growth of production quality workloads in the public cloud is just starting to accelerate, and Microsoft believes it is well-positioned to take advantage of this phenomenon.
  • The Azure portal that is used to back DRaaS supports more than 50 languages.
  • ASR pricing is simple: It is priced on the number of instances protected, or through the OMS add-on.
  • Microsoft received high customer reference scores for service feature innovation, service cost-effectiveness and simplicity of the provider portal GUI.
Cautions:
  • Although its installed base is growing rapidly, Microsoft currently does not have the same level of service delivery experience as some of its larger competitors (for example, IBM, Sungard Availability Services and Verizon).
  • Currently, Microsoft supports only self-service delivery and lacks the hybrid configuration management capabilities of some of its competitors.
  • Microsoft received low customer reference scores for the quality of technical support and contract flexibility. It also received a low customer reference score for account management. Microsoft now has a dedicated technical support team for its data and availability solutions.
  • Microsoft's recovery management experience with data configurations that contain a wide variety of system platform types (for example, IBM System i, IBM System p, Oracle Solaris and HP-UX) is limited.
ChannelE2E says: Microsoft will increasingly promote Azure-based services -- including DRaaS -- to channel partners. Check in with Microsoft partner program leaders to understand how the Azure offerings fit into the broader partner program. And watch firms like Arterian, which are building cloud solutions provider businesses atop Azure and Office 365.

6. Liberty Global

Strengths:
  • Liberty Global's operations availability service-level commitment is 100%.
  • Liberty Global was well above the provider median in terms of the number of actual disaster declarations that had been serviced.
  • Liberty Global received perfect (five out of five) customer satisfaction scores for its hybrid configuration support and account management quality from its reference customers.
  • Liberty Global also received the highest reference customer satisfaction rating on contract flexibility.
Cautions:
  • Liberty Global's customer management portal for DRaaS was recently augmented to include additional hybrid delivery capability, but it may not be as robust as some competing portals.
  • Liberty Global's regulatory compliance (Payment Card Industry only) is not as broad as that of many of the other providers in this Magic Quadrant.
  • Although support from Liberty Global is available in both English and Spanish, the management portal text is currently provided only in English.
  • The breadth of Liberty Global's related professional services are somewhat limited.
ChannelE2E says: We weren't able to find partner program information for Liberty Global.

7. Sungard Availability Services

Strengths
  • Crash-consistent and application-consistent recovery across multitier applications (both physical and virtual) is supported by Sungard AS.
  • Sungard AS's physical and logical isolations of customer configurations minimize the probability of security breaches.
  • Sungard AS supports compliance with SSAE 16 Service Organization Control (SOC) Type 2, as well as PCI DSS, HIPAA and International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001.
  • Sungard AS received high customer reference scores for account management quality.
Cautions
  • Because Recover2Cloud is a provider-managed service, minimal integration was provided between Sungard AS's portal and on-premises operations management utilities. However, this is beginning to improve as a result of management portal integration with on-premises ESR-NetApp, ESR-Actifio and ESR-EMC software.
  • Sungard AS's recovery SLAs are functions of the type of VM and the size of the VM configuration.
  • With Sungard AS, external audits of cloud operations are performed only once a year.
  • Opportunities for improvement cited by reference customers include service cost- effectiveness, contract flexibility and the simplicity of provider portal GUI.
ChannelE2E says: We know several MSPs in the financial services vertical that leverage SunGard Availability Services. Find partner program information here.

Graphic: Gartner DRaaS Magic Quadrant Chart

Now that you've read about each company a bit, here's a look at each company's position on the DRaaS Magic Quadrant chart... Gartner-Magic-Quarant-DRaaS-2016
Joe Panettieri

Joe Panettieri is co-founder & editorial director of MSSP Alert and ChannelE2E, the two leading news & analysis sites for managed service providers in the cybersecurity market.