VMblog readers have become quite familiar with HotLink -- a virtualization and cloud company intent on simplifying hybrid IT management, and a company that always seems to be a contender for some type of "Best of VMworld" award.

Recently, the company found itself back in the news with the launch of a new product, a Managed DRaaS (disaster recovery-as-a-service) offering that utilizes Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide holistic VMware data protection and cost-effective business resiliency.

To find out more about this market and the company's solution, I spoke with Lynn LeBlanc, HotLink's founder and CEO.

Lyn LeBlanc:  For years, companies weighing their options for disaster recovery and business continuity have sought a "set it and forget it" solution for DR/BC. They wanted something affordable and easily accessible that would ensure they could restore their environments in the event of a failure or outage. HotLink Managed DRaaS is the only solution to provide cloud-based DR/BC leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS), tight integration with customers' on-premise VMware management and the expert services needed to ensure continuous protection. Best of all, our new solution delivers fully managed DR/BC in a dramatically more affordable manner than any other market options, because HotLink Managed DRaaS takes advantage of the public cloud economics and scalability delivered by AWS.

The new HotLink Managed DRaaS is specifically designed to provide IT organizations with the technology, skilled resources, cloud knowledge, hybrid IT experience, methodology and continuous service delivery required for complete business resiliency. No matter what disruption is incurred, whether it's a security breach, networking failure, software issue, human error or any other unexpected condition, HotLink Managed DRaaS ensures that environments are restored to provide business continuity. 

VMblog:  Why is disaster recovery/business continuity such a hot button in the news these days? 

LeBlanc:  A report from the Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council recently found that 73 percent of companies are unprepared for a disaster. Moreover, 58 percent rarely or never test their DR/BC plans. That's because testing is difficult, manual and expensive, so it often falls by the wayside. Unfortunately, failing to test is the Achilles' heel of successful recovery following a disaster. Every company knows they need to make DR/BC a higher priority - security breaches, data loss and outages are more pervasive every day. A properly tested and monitored DR practice is the difference between success and failure.

Another reason DR/BC is a hot topic throughout the industry is simply because IT downtime is increasingly unacceptable and business-critical. Outages can create significant financial losses, and in the worst cases, the impact is dramatic enough to drive a company out of business. Despite this risk, data protection budgets are generally not increasing. Companies need effective DR/BC options at affordable prices, and that's exactly where HotLink Managed DRaaS delivers.

VMblog: How is HotLink's offering different than anything else on the market right now?  What makes it unique?

LeBlanc:  Unlike typical DRaaS offerings that are too expensive for most organizations to deploy, HotLink Managed DRaaS benefits from the low pricing, broad reach and unlimited scalability of AWS. The new service is built around HotLink's award-winning product, HotLink DR Express, the only VMware-certified DR/BC solution that is deeply integrated with VMware management and provides intuitive and automated VMware data protection in AWS including backup, replication, disaster recovery and business continuity. The new HotLink Managed DRaaS delivers a seamless environment so companies can quickly and predictably adapt to disruptions and maintain continuous business operations, all managed by the expert services, skills and technical resources of HotLink's team.

VMblog:  What types of companies could most benefit from HotLink's new offering?

LeBlanc:  Organizations of all sizes now rely on mission-critical systems to transact daily, all of which needs to be protected. IT teams struggle to meet day-to-day business needs, let alone add the monitoring, testing and secondary site maintenance that traditional solutions require. HotLink Managed DRaaS is the ideal solution for organizations that cannot deploy and maintain a disaster recovery site themselves. HotLink provides affordable business resiliency options for IT shops of all sizes and offers the best of both worlds - public cloud scale and economics together with highly skilled managed services. By utilizing DRaaS that leverages the public cloud, HotLink builds and maintains a contingency site in AWS. HotLink Managed DRaaS lets customers select the optimal service level to meet their individual business needs and budgetary requirements - Silver, Gold and Platinum options are available, spanning weekly, daily and 24/7 service-level delivery. We have designed a fully managed DRaaS solution specifically because we understand the many competing requirements most IT teams have to address each day. With HotLink Management DRaaS companies have an affordable, fully managed DR/BC solution to address any kind of disaster, whether the disruption is a security breach, networking failure, software issue, human error or more significant failure condition.

VMblog:  Who is your typical buyer?  And how would he or she make an internal argument for working with you?

LeBlanc:  Most executives and IT decision-makers recognize the benefits of public cloud as a key ingredient in the overall infrastructure they manage. However, a majority of workloads are running on-premise using VMware infrastructure. Leveraging the public cloud as a secondary failover site significantly streamlines the DR/BC approach and ensures it remains cost-effective and affordable. HotLink's fully managed DRaaS solution leveraging AWS is the missing link needed to match what companies need for data protection and what they are able to afford. Integrating cloud-based DR/BC resources are with existing on-premise management infrastructure is key to seamless testing and failover. When companies are in the market for a DR/BC solution, the conversation will always focus on ease of management and affordability, and HotLink Managed DRaaS excels in both.

VMblog:  Can you give VMblog readers some idea of what might be coming next? 

LeBlanc:  All companies need a way to economically deploy and manage a DR/BC environment, and public cloud-based DRaaS offers a new model to make this possible. DRaaS is the ideal approach for organizations that wish to protect their growing IT environments but cannot practically deploy and maintain DR/BC sites themselves. Now that HotLink has launched the first easy, affordable, integrated and fully managed DRaaS solution leveraging AWS, we are really looking forward to working with IT teams across all industries to deploy this groundbreaking option and enable comprehensive protection from the inevitable failures that affect every data center.

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Thank you to Lynn LeBlanc, CEO of HotLink, for taking time to explain the company's new DRaaS offering to VMblog readers.