The DRaaS market provides for the recovery of enterprise applications at another location in the event of a disaster. The provider can deliver the service as a fully managed, assisted recovery or self-service offering. The service should be marketed and sold as a stand-alone, industrialized offering and minimally include: - On-demand recovery cloud for planned tests, exercises and declarations - Server image and production data replication to the cloud - Automated failover and failback between production and the target cloud environment - Recovery time service-level agreements (SLAs)
Gartner defines strategic cloud platform services as standardized, automated, public cloud offerings integrating infrastructure services (e.g., computing, network and storage), platform services (e.g., managed application and data services) and transformation services (programs/resources that help customers adopt cloud-oriented IT delivery models). Infrastructure and platform services may be hosted in providers’ infrastructures or customers’ data centers; however, they’re owned by the service provider. Services should be elastically scalable, metered by use, and consumable via web-based interfaces and programmable APIs. Transformation programs may be delivered by automated, self-service interfaces and managed interactions facilitated by account teams/partners.