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INTERNATIONAL AGENTS
SECTION
Cloud Backup, Storage
Boost MSP Chops
By
Tara
Seals
When it comes to making the
transition to being a managed ser-
vice provider, offering cloud backup
services is one way to increase
business revenue opportunities and
customer retention – especially in
compliance-driven verticals, such as
healthcare and financial services. A
recent survey from Asigra shows that
89 percent of MSPs offering cloud
backup services are profitable, and
87 percent expect profit margins to
grow in 2017. About 67 percent of
those profitable MSPs are offering
cloud backup as a bundled service.
In terms of the vertical markets
most commonly served by cloud
backup services, financial services,
professional services, healthcare
and medical, and legal markets
topped the survey. The data reinforc-
es the importance of comprehensive
backup solutions for industry verti-
cals with compliance requirements
such as HIPAA.
“This survey re-affirms that cloud
backup services offer an excellent
path for MSPs to increase revenue
from existing and new customers,
and become trusted advisors by
reliably managing customer’s vital
business data no matter where it
resides,” said Eran Farajun, execu-
tive vice president, Asigra.
The survey also revealed that the
majority of MSPs that offer cloud
backup services today are marketing
this offering as a trailing comple-
mentary service. This go-to-market
strategy positions cloud backup ser-
vices as a component of an overall
portfolio, enabling MSPs to bundle
these services for free or low cost,
increasing customer retention and
wallet share with existing custom-
ers. One area not being fully utilized,
as evidenced in the survey data: few
MSPs perform regularly scheduled
recovery drills for customers. Only
about half of the surveyed MSPs are
performing them at all, and of those,
fewer than 3 percent of customers
are consistently performing sched-
uled drills. MSPs can re-evaluate
this aspect of their cloud backup
service offering to protect customer
data, realize additional revenue and
cross-sell other services.
A perfect example of this is TIG,
an MSP in the U.K., which has put
together a high-performance file and
block storage offering alongside a
cloud backup solution. Cloud ser-
vices are one of the fastest-growing
revenue sources for TIG, and the
company was intrigued by a
new business opportunity:
leveraging cloud-based
multi-tenancy to manage
a number of customers in
segregated environments
on the same server. This
enables TIG’s customers
to receive dedicated storage not
shared with any other users, yielding
high, predictable performance.
It turned to Zadara Storage to
build a storage and backup solu-
tion that TIG could promote to its
customers as a flexible pay-as-you-
go service. In a more traditional
service model, offering storage
services to end customers would
require MSPs like TIG to procure
and support large storage arrays
in their own environment – a major
up-front capital expense invest-
ment. However, in this model, if TIG
weren’t able to sell enough storage
capacity, or if they lost a major stor-
age customer, the company would
run the risk of losing money on that
investment. Creating a storage and
backup solution based on software
and on-demand services allows TIG
to offer aggressive, agile services
that meet changing customer re-
quirements very quickly, for faster
revenue realization.
“For a service provider like TIG,
it’s vitally important to maximize
the resources at hand, and as cli-
ents’ storage needs ebb and flow,
to be able to meet their needs
quickly and without incurring a sig-
nificant infrastructure expense,”
said Nelson Nahum, CEO and co-
founder at Zadara Storage.
It was also important to TIG that
the solution enabled agile manage-
ment, allowing the service provider
to move quickly and strategically in
times of peak usage or unplanned
events, to take advantage of the fact
that storage and backup capacity
can scale in minutes.
“[This allows] us to be extremely
nimble – in combination, they really
align our business around a pure
opex model,” said George Georgiou,
sales director at London-based TIG.
“In the past, if a customer needed
more storage, we would have to order
and build the capacity, and it could
take six to eight weeks to expand the
environment. And if the customer’s
need was only temporary, we were
stuck paying off a big capex invest-
ment. These channel-friendly service-
based models from Asigra and
Zadara give us the ability to scale our
environment on-demand, according to
customer requirements. If you don’t
have this kind of flexibility and agility
in today’s marketplace, you’re not
even in business.”
Top Reasons MSPs Add Cloud Backup
Grow monthly recurring revenue
78%
Expand total addressable market
46%
Increase top line revenue
44%
Increase wallet share from existing customers 42%
Source: Asigra
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July - August 2016