ViaWest Launches New Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service Product

**Editor’s Note: Click here for our recently compiled list of new products and services that partners can sell.**

ViaWest, the hybrid IT services provider and data center operator, has introduced Cloud Recovery – DRaaS, a disaster-recovery-as-a-service product, to its partners.

The product increases the speed in which businesses can recover from an outage, and allows them to replicate their business-critical data at a secure ViaWest facility, regardless of whether their production site is located on premises, at a ViaWest data center or at another provider’s data center, the company said. ViaWest has 29 North American data centers.

Isaiah Hogberg, ViaWest’s national director of channel sales, tells Channel Partners that his company views this as a “tremendous sales tool that will allow partners to increase their earnings, reinforce their trusted-advisor status and create stickiness with their clients.”

“Cloud Recovery – DRaaS is also a great way for agents to break into the cloud if they are not already there,” he said.

ViaWest works with a variety of different partners, including agents, master agents, brokers, VARs, MSPs and system integrators. It has hundreds of these partners.

“This presents new opportunities for partners as ViaWest Cloud Recovery – DRaaS is a product that companies of all sizes, even the smallest or the largest enterprises, can take advantage of in order to safeguard their businesses against catastrophic data loss,” Hogberg said. “DRaaS technology has evolved significantly, and our Cloud Recovery – DRaaS lets our partners provide their clients with a simple, cost-effective, stress-free disaster-recovery solution. This enables their customers to focus on growing their businesses instead of managing a time, energy or capital intensive DR strategy.”

According to a recent Gartner report, just 6 percent of companies survive longer than two years after a major data loss, 43 percent were immediately put out of business, and an additional 51 percent closed their doors within two years. It costs an average company $5,600 per minute in lost revenue, contract penalties, supply-chain ripple effects, lost productivity and other costs when its network is down, which translates to more than $330,000 per hour, it said.

The new product is an extension of ViaWest’s existing cloud offerings and enhances its hybrid IT services set of colocation, cloud, compliance and security services, according to the company.

ViaWest also includes one free failover test each year to ensure that IT managers are not surprised by any issues related to recovering their data and restoring their operations.