Gartner Places NTT Communications in Leader Quadrant for Performance as Hosted Disaster Recovery Service Provider

NTT Communications (NTT Com) recently announced that Gartner placed it in the leader quadrant for the disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) industry. The quadrant designation is part of the Magic Quadrant evaluation system that Gartner compiles for various industries.

NTT Communications Corporation is a subsidiary of NTT Group (NTT). Both companies are based in Tokyo. The NTT name is an abbreviation for Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, which originates back to the 19^th century when the telegraph first appeared in Japan.

First formed in 1999, NTT Com provides long distance, international phone service and ICT services under the NTT umbrella. It continues to provide those services today, with the ICT portion focused on data center, networking and cloud services. NTT Com has a presence today in 196 countries with its networking infrastructure.

Gartner Inc.’s Magic Quadrant system evaluates companies in a given industry using a two-axis graph. One axis evaluates a company’s vision as it relates to advancing the industry; the other axis evaluates the company’s execution of its plan. Companies that are strong in both areas will appear in the leader quadrant. This is not an endorsement of a company on Gartner’s part, but simply an evaluation of the company’s performance.

The DRaaS services that NTT Com offers are another reason that businesses are shifting their IT to the cloud. There may be no country in the world where DRaaS is appreciated more than in Japan. The devastating 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that originated off the coast of Japan in March 2011 left numerous exchange buildings without power and also severed trunk and cable lines. Many companies in the area became interested in the cloud after this disaster.

NTT Com has identified four areas it feels that the cloud can be a great platform for DRaaS. Backup and recovery is facilitated by keeping data off-site at redundant locations. This is also true for cloud archiving, which is especially important, since many businesses are required by regulation to keep records for an extended period of time. Cloud-based failover performs server replication after a server crashes and virtualization makes it easier for successful recovery than it would be with a group of physical machines.

In a market where the customers have a great appreciation of the benefits of disaster recovery, NTT Com’s designation as a leader in the DRaaS industry gives it a competitive advantage. The company has developed a solid game plan that can help its customers recover from a disaster or security breach with as little downtime as possible.