To provide business continuity and data protection for local firms, fiber broadband and technology solutions provider Converge ICT Solutions Inc. has announced its partnership with US tech giant Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE) to introduce Disaster-Recovery-As-A-Service (DRAAS) as a sub-set of its cloud offerings in the Philippines.
At a launch event held recently at the Seda Hotel in Taguig City, Converge ICT Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Operations Officer (COO) Jesus C. Romero said that ransomware attacks in the country have doubled in 2023.
“In addition to this problem, the Philippines is also prone to natural disasters. At the same time, 60% of information technology disaster recovery (ITDR) incidents are caused by human errors,” Romero said.
Sean Alegre, Assistant Vice President for Product Development at Converge ICT Solutions Inc., said DRAAS is seeking to remedy these issues through an in-country cloud computing offering that provides organizations best-in-class business continuity and data protection capabilities using Continuous Data Protection (CDP) technology.
Converge ICT said it will offer DRAAS in a pay-as-you-grow model with no upfront cost. There are no egress charges as well as international private line costs since data is stored within the country. This, the company said, gives users better control and privacy over data.
DRAAS is designed to be simple, thus it only requires software to be installed on customers’ sites. It features an Always-On Replication, which gives the fastest Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO). This means critical business systems of organizations can go back online minutes after the disaster, and keep their data seconds before the disaster.
Changes to the data are also logged into a digital journal, making it easier to find the recovery points before an incident. The DRAAS also highlights application-centric recovery which groups related virtual machines for simpler and consistent recovery.

Its Built-In Orchestration and Automation also gives users an easier time performing failover, failbacks, and testing. These features make Converge DRAAS a world-class business continuity product, but only at the cost of traditional data back-up and recovery.
The service will be provided with three options for implementation:
- Self-Service
- Assisted or Partially Managed
- Fully Managed
HPE, for its part, will provide the cloud hosting infrastructure and a continuous data protection engine called Zerto that would detect ransomware attacks within seconds, and would trigger the DRAAS infrastructure to begin the isolation, mitigation, and recovery process. This quick action would give the clients a near-zero downtime, the company said.
Zerto does not take snapshots of the data content. The client would be able to choose only the specific data to be stored and backed-up, reducing “white space” and storage footprint.
Chew Weng Keng, HPE Asia Pacific Service Leader and Managing Director for the Philippines, said DRAAS is an ideal solution for a private cloud environment that provides insurance for data and business continuity.