In early October of 2010, Storage Guardian — an online data backup service provider — was selling its on-site data backup service for 25 cents. Maybe the price sounded a little crazy at the time, but offering to store a portion of a company’s backup files on-site made serious sense. And sure enough. over the last four months, Storage Guardian has sold over one million gigabytes of local backup storage to its roughly 1,800 enterprise customers, the company says.

Still, Storage Guardian isn’t a new kid on the storage block. The company, founded in 1991 is a veteran in the data backup industry. For about two decades now, says Dave Minns, Storage Guardian’s channel leader, the company has focused on providing two types of data storage. One is active data — sensitive material stored off-site that companies still need to have readily available. The second is inactive data — a lower-cost method for less sensitive material that can be stored on a larger drive. Its business plan has been simple and effective: Clients provide Storage Guardian with at least one gigabyte of data and then get to choose the data retention length.

But 2011 will bring a a third direction into the mix for Storage Guardian. The company will soon let its clients communicate with their business partners through Storage Guardian’s own cloud system. Instead of having to set up their own cloud network to do business, said Minns, they’ll be able to do it all through the storage Guardian site. The company will also integrate ConnectWise — the professional service automation (PSA) software provider.

Storage Guardian already offers something called Cloud Continuity. When a company’s server is down, Cloud Continuity allows them to still run what Storage Guardian calls, “critical business activity” while the system is being repaired. Storage Guardian’s clients can access their data through the company’s cloud server. So in a sense, Storage Guardian is just expanding the availability of its cloud system to its clients.

Of course, there are numerous online storage companies and backup specialists competing for the MSP industry’s attention. We’re reaching out to as many as possible to see what makes each company tick.

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