Like big data, IoT and predictive analytics before it, the cloud services trend is the opportunity no one can stop gabbing about. Gartner projects that the worldwide public cloud services market will grow 21.4 percent in 2018 to total $186.4 billion, up from $153.5 billion in 2017. But managed service providers (MSPs) know that not all cloud services opportunities are created equally or hold the same potential for profit.

Shridar Subramanian, VP of product management and marketing at StorageCraft, says that the blanket industry term “cloud services” is pretty broad but can safely be said to include all the as-a-service offerings that can enhance or replace traditional on-premises solutions. For its part, StorageCraft is counting on the backup and disaster recovery cloud services market to lead the way. The disaster-recover-as-a-service (DRaaS) opportunity alone is set to hit more than $3.7 billion by 2021, with a giant amount of that revenue funneled through MSPs, according to analysts.

To that end, StorageCraft on Thursday announced a slew of enhancements to its DRaaS offerings for MSPs designed to help partners increase margins and capitalize on the ubiquitous cloud-services opportunity.

Shridar Subramanian

Shridar Subramanian

Sitting right on top of the list of features the provider is touting is a new cloud pooling capability, brand new to its offerings. StorageCraft Cloud Services now pools the data capacity of each machine at each service level, letting MSPs plan and load-balance their total data capacity. The company admits it’s something partners have been pushing for for a while now and says cloud pooling helps service providers avoid unplanned overages, opens up new markets and increases margins. 

“Because we pool at the partner level, a partner can leverage the total capacity of all their machines across multiple customers and reduce or eliminate overage charges,” says Subramanian. “This will lower their overall costs and therefore improve their margins.”

It’s also added one-click orchestrated recovery that lets MSPs preconfigure each client’s recovery sequence through the StorageCraft Cloud Services web portal.

The company tacked on a promotion to the product-enhancement releases, too, offering a 30-day free virtualization trial. Subramanian says most cloud solution providers charge for every minute of virtualization used, and that the trial lets partners run full DR tests without having to incur additional costs. When the 30 days are up, there’s a fixed per hour charge for the virtualization time, he says.

The noise in the cloud-services market is growing deafening, and within it the DRaaS sector is perhaps the hottest right now. Though infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is projected to grow faster, there’s little question that disaster recovery is the business application on everyone’s lips. As Gartner points out, the sea of providers with their different approaches and offerings is resulting in a great deal of complexity and confusion within the DRaaS market, and it can be hard for providers to be seen and heard past the Dattos and IBMs. With these enhancements, StorageCraft hopes to make a little noise of its own.