Once relegated to the proverbial back burner, disaster recovery (DR) has emerged as one of the leading priorities for IT decision makers at mid-market and enterprise companies. In a recent survey of approximately 400 IT professionals conducted by Peak 10, a national IT infrastructure and cloud services provider, DR was cited as one of their top initiatives for 2016 and beyond. For Peak 10, the increased emphasis on ensuring the timely recovery of data among mid-sized businesses has played a significant role in its 107% year-over-year growth for its DR solutions.
While Peak 10 has offered DR solutions since its inception in 2000, the company credits the introduction of its Recovery Cloud as a key driver in the company’s unprecedented success in the DR services market. A Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) solution, the Recovery Cloud stands out among many competitive products because of its continuous data protection and industry-leading recovery time and recovery point objectives which were incorporated to better meet the needs of mid-sized and enterprise companies.
In addition to its appeal to customers, Peak 10’s Recovery Cloud has garnered attention from industry analysts and others. Peak 10 was the first provider in the Americas to achieve the Cisco Powered Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) designation under the Cisco® Cloud and Managed Services Advanced Certification. It was also listed on Gartner’s first-ever DRaaS Magic Quadrant in 2015.
“Building and maintaining the infrastructure for fast, efficient recovery following a disaster is a difficult, costly and disruptive task for any business,” said David Alvarado, regional director of Service Delivery for Peak 10. “Luckily for our customers, Peak 10 has the infrastructure and expertise to do just that. We enable our customers to failover to our IT environment, and then fail back to their production environment once they go back to live status. It’s a two-way functionality that other vendors don’t offer.”
Peak 10, which has one of the highest customer satisfaction ratings in the industry and is recognized for its consultative approach, has continued to enhance its Recovery Cloud service. That includes increasing its focus on DR testing and building Disaster Recovery plans in response to customer needs as part of its newly launched Advanced Client Services. The company also continues to partner with industry leaders in the DR space including, DoubleTake and Zerto, to bolster its DR offerings.
“Additionally, we have made significant investments in re-architecting our customer portal,” added Alvarado. “We’re now able to provide customers with protection status, quantities, sizes, recovery point metrics and other statistical information on protected systems in real-time via the portal.”
Virginia United Methodist Homes (VUMH) is one of the companies that has taken advantage of Peak 10’s DR expertise and services. The organization was in need of a redundant DR site to run operations seamlessly at all its communities if something went down at its primary location. Mark Collins, IT director for VUMH stated, “We had contracted with Peak 10 before we had a plan to move our corporate office and data center, so everything came together at the right time.”
He added that the organization had run multiple tests with Peak 10 and had expected the effort to go smoothly. “It was pretty seamless and met our needs,” he said. “There were minor cleanup issues on our end, but by and large it went the way we expected.”
Peak 10 continues to invest in new technologies and expand its capabilities to better meet mid-market and enterprise companies’ DR needs and overall IT infrastructure requirements. That includes the company’s recent deployment of low-cost object storage, which can be used for a number of use cases including backup and archiving. With data erasure coded, encrypted and spread across three geographically diverse data centers located more than 200 miles away, the solution offers greater resiliency and data protection than many competitive products.