Teneros Rounding Up VARs For Disaster Recovery In The Cloud

Teneros, a Mountain View, Calif.-based messaging vendor, has recently launched what it's calling a Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service offering, a hosted service that gives enterprises a disaster recovery solution for e-mail and other communications without upfront capital costs.

The hosted DR-as-a-Service uses Teneros Instant-On failover recovery and replication technologies to ensure high availability. While eliminating the need for costly hardware, it gives SMBs, and enterprises, an e-mail and messaging disaster recovery option without in-house gear. Teneros DR-as-a-Service works with platforms like Microsoft Exchange, BlackBerry, Active Directory, SharePoint and DNS and is a Software-as-a-Service play evolved from its disaster recovery appliance offerings.

With its cloud-based offering, Teneros pairs with providers, but handles the management itself with monitoring, software updates, patches and compliance adherence.

And as Teneros' DR-as-a-Service takes hold, the company is building out its channel around DR-as-a-Service. Teneros is turning to the channel to offer services around the prevention of e-mail downtime and offer companies of all sizes a way to ensure they have always-on access to e-mail and other communications tools.

Manish Kalia, Teneros CMO and founder, said there is a growing market for VARs to offer DR-as-a-Service for e-mail and other messaging and communications platforms and many companies lack a plan to ensure that e-mail is up and running and that the data is protected.

According to a recent Teneros survey, many companies still have no disaster recovery plan in place for critical corporate assets, such as email.

The survey polled 595 organizations and more than 50 percent said prevention of e-mail downtime is important, very important or extremely important, but that they lack the budget needed to support traditional disaster recovery solutions.

Additionally, more than two-thirds of the companies surveyed said in the event of an unplanned site outage, no more than four hours of downtime would be considered acceptable. Meanwhile, 44 percent of companies use a branch office or a remote office data center server as their remote disaster recovery site and more than 35 percent of companies surveyed said they didn't have a remote data center location for recovery. In the SMB market, those numbers were higher, Teneros said.

"There's a need for these recovery methods," Kalia said. "There's definitely a strong demand for messaging disaster recovery."

"Email is the most important communication and file transfer system in the corporate world today, but it is often too costly for companies to invest in the infrastructure needed to protect their data," Michael Osterman, principal of Osterman Research, added in a statement. "The cloud's cost-savings, always-on availability and reliability can solve this problem. Companies that offer disaster-recovery-as-a-service will enjoy a massive new market opportunity while solving one of the key business problems facing information-intensive businesses today."

Kalia said Teneros plans to build out a channel where partners can add DR-as-a-Service into other services offerings.

"Because the SMB market will be a key target, DR-as-a-Service partners selling other services can tie it into and add it onto them," he said. "[The channel needs] solution they can take to customers and use as an avenue to more services."