IT research firm Gartner expects 30% of midsize companies to follow recovery-in-the-cloud, also known as recovery-as-a-service (RaaS), to support IT operations recovery by 2014. This would only be a percentage increase from present times.

According to John Morency, research vice president at Gartner, though RaaS has been touted as a ‘killer’ cloud app for disaster recovery, the reality is that it has been largely hype and only some truth.

As per Gartner, RaaS addresses four principal pain points, which include recovery testing/exercising costs; change skew; recovery configuration startup; testing scope.

The research company says that there are two types of midsize companies using RaaS at present. One type of companies use server virtualisation recovery features and SAN-based replication to deploy in-house disaster recovery solutions for certain applications.

The others use it for implementing initial pilots for the use of cloud services as an alternative to more traditional disaster recovery resources.

Morency adds, "For organisations that have not yet trialled RaaS, Gartner recommends commencing cloud infrastructure due diligence, especially for systems that already reside primarily outside their data centre."