The improved maturity of Disaster Recovery as a Service is making it the cloud service of choice for organisations looking to migrate to the cloud.

With 78% of organisations having adopted at least one type of cloud-based service, the uptake of DRaaS has proven to be one of the services which has seen year-on-year growth since 2012, with it now expected to be the top service choice for those looking to adopt cloud services.

According to Databarracks research, while historically DRaaS has mainly been adopted in heavily regulated industries such as finance, the adoption is now being seen across all verticals.

Gartner predicts that by 2018, the size of the DRaaS market will exceed that of the more traditional subscription based DR services.

Peter Groucutt, MD of Databarracks believes that this highlights the increased level of maturity of the disaster recovery market. He said: "As the report points out, traditionally early adopters of DRaaS tended to be fairly small organisations, who needed to free up the time of their over-stretched in-house IT teams.

"For most large organisations, with big secondary sites for disaster recovery and dedicated staff for business continuity, the move to a cloud-based DR service was both too expensive and overly complex."

The growing choice of providers combined with lower monthly service costs are seen as playing key roles in the growing appeal of DRaaS across the market.

Groucutt, continued: "The flexibility of DRaaS has changed this. As well as being more cost-effective than traditional DR, it’s a lot simpler to implement. You can set it up behind the scenes, and your users will be completely unaffected – there is minimal downtime.

"Organisations today are under immense pressure to deal with rapidly growing data and ensure consistent uptime for their users – for them, DRaaS is a lifeline.

"Small organisations don’t need dedicated in-house staff with technical disaster recovery knowledge and large organisations don’t need to pay for expensive secondary sites. They can ensure their business is protected at all times, at a fraction of the cost of traditional DR."

The Databarracks research was compiled following a survey of over 400 IT professionals, with the findings supported by Gartner’s report into DRaaS.