Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) said it reached a $374 million deal to acquire Zerto, a cloud-based data management and protection company, and plans to add these services to its GreenLake as-a-service portfolio.

Zerto’s continuous data protection platform includes disaster recovery (DR), backup, and data mobility across on-premises, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments. It can replicate and migrate data between VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments and natively to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

IDC projects the data protection as-a-service market will grow from $7.7 billion in 2020, to $15.3 billion in 2024, and providing this technology is becoming increasingly important to legacy infrastructure vendors like HPE and Dell Technologies as they race to offer all of their products as cloud-delivered services.

HPE CEO Antonio Neri, in 2019, committed to offer the company’s entire product lineup as a service under its GreenLake portfolio by 2022. However, the vendor has yet to disclose how far along, percentage wise, it is on this cloud services journey.

HPE says it will make Zerto available through HPE GreenLake and its Data Services Cloud Console.

In a blog post about the deal, Forrester analyst Brent Ellis says it’s a smart move for HPE, and that it’s a “much better buy” than IBM’s recent Cloudlogic ECX acquisition, which brought that copy data management technology in house.

“Many existing MSPs already bundle Zerto as their data mover for DR and DRaaS functionality, especially for near-zero latency RPOs,” Ellis wrote. “If you think of ITaaS as an MSP on steroids, it makes a lot of sense for HPE to buy one of the best solutions on the market (bolstering its own capability and disrupting the capabilities of potential competitors).”

He also notes that IT as a service is “the next big thing” for both HPE and Dell. “Being able to simplify the management of infrastructure requires being able to assure platform resilience, making DRaaS a must-have tool,” he wrote. “Expect Dell to announce soon that it also acquired or partnered with a best-of-breed CDM tool or at least improved one of the tools in its portfolio.”