​​ ​​ Today’s Backup and Disaster Recovery Business Market and What Can MSPs Do to Improve their Cloud Service Offerings

Data Analytics and Big Data have become the latest buzzwords in the IT industry. As more businesses are realizing the significance of online presence and learning the fundamentals of e-commerce, the need for cloud backup and disaster recovery solutions are also increasing.
Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are leading the SMB market as businesses are looking for strategic and reliable partners, who can provide robust cloud backup and data protection solutions. Since downtimes have proven to cause significant losses, MSPs are expected to lend a helping hand by keeping this problem at bay. For instance, in an event of an outage — whether caused by natural disasters or human errors, MSPs are able to provide rapid database recoveries, allowing the affected companies to get back on track quickly.

Backup and Disaster Recovery Solutions Market and Domain Advancements

According to Markets and Markets research, the Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) market will grow from USD $1.7 Billion in 2016 to USD $11.2 Billion by 2021*. This growth trend is expected to continue in the years beyond 2021. A similar study by TechNavio predicts that the global backup as a service market to grow at a CAGR of around 27% in the period from 2016 to 2020.**
MSPs have been adding modern cloud backup and protection solutions to their offerings which have proven to be quite promising to businesses in all industries. Yet, at the same time, some MSPs continue to struggle to create a demand for their BDR business. Here are a few ways they can succeed in that endeavor:

• • • Justifying the Need and Creating Awareness: Many companies are not still aware of what IT disasters are, and how disasters can impact their businesses. As an MSP, it is your responsibility to educate them on the matter and show them how little things like data breaches, network failures, etc. can make the entire business collapse.
    • Focusing on Downtime: You must show how downtime can directly contribute to a financial loss and damage the reputation of a business. A good example to use here is the Delta Airlines data center downtime incident that caused chaos in US Airports in 2016. The Delta systems were down for a mere 6 hours, but the damage it caused was substantial. There were more than 2,000 delayed flights – about one-third of the airline’s entire schedule, and they needed to cancel hundreds of flights, leaving thousands of passengers stranded for hours.
    • Showing the Value of BDR Solution: Show them how cloud computing solutions can offer speedy backup recovery (Granular Recovery Technology, Sever Mirroring, etc.), protection against ransomware (which has become the number one threat to the organizations globally nowadays), 24/7 network surveillance for immediate intrusion detection, etc.

Improving Cloud Service Offerings

If you are an MSP and are interested to increase your cloud offerings, it might be fitting to start from such services as Cloud app migration & management, consultancy, and private cloud services. In addition, you can also offer Identity Management as a separate service.
Identity management is becoming a natural requirement for organizations that want to improve employee management and get a better control on company resources access. However, companies often lack the expertise. This is where you come in as an MSP. You can incorporate related services, such as device management, user management, password management in your existing cloud services. There is a huge demand for these services, and you can certainly benefit from venturing into these value added services.

Conclusion

Disaster recovery infrastructure needs considerable upfront investments. Additional investments are also needed for hardware and networks keep up after the initial investments. Many SMEs shy away from implementing disaster recovery solutions in their systems, on premises, due to these associated high costs, which is one of the primary growth drivers for this market. Therefore, companies instead opt for the annual subscription model of BaaS.
* https://goo.gl/OEwoxi
** https://goo.gl/2QWnIg