A recent survey of 434 VARs conducted by Cloudberry Lab, a provider of cloud backup service that makes use of public clouds, finds that backup and recovery services are not only offered by two-thirds of them, almost a third of them (30.2 percent) said managed cloud backup services accounted for a majority or a significant portion of their profits.

Just as importantly, 79 percent expect to see an increase in demand for managed backup services over the next 12 months.

At a time when most IT organizations are struggling with the amount of data they need to manage many of them are increasingly turning to MSPs to manage backup and recovery on their behalf. As a result solution providers across the channel are now paying as much attention to how backup and recovery software actually works as they are how much money they can make selling it. The reason for that is service level agreements (SLAs) are usually attached to how quickly an MSP not only backs data up, but also recovers it.

Speed of Recovery Tops Customer Wish Lists

In fact, the important attribute of backup and recovery software cited by survey respondents as being most important to the customer speed of recovery (24.4 percent) followed closely by ease of use (22.6 percent) top of the list. Only 10.8 percent cited the actual cost of the software. But when solution providers were asked that question from their perspective when backing data up to the cloud, reliability ranked highest,” with 26.6 percent followed closely by cost at 23.4 percent.

Given those data points IT organizations should be move to cloud back in drives. But solution providers report that worries about data confidentiality and the location of backups was cited by 33.2 percent as their top concern. Concerns about not being able to select specific cloud providers to store their data was chosen as the top factor by 24.7 percent, while fears about not being able to recover or of a slow recovery was a close third with 21.9 percent citing this as the most important factor.

The BDR Process and Customer Needs

Alexander Negrash, director of marketing for CloudBerry Lab, said that backup and recovery will be a hybrid process involving local copies and cloud backups for years to come, and it’s apparent that many IT organizations want someone to manage that process on their behalf.

In fact, in the grand scheme of IT things backup and recovery might be roughly equivalent to taking out the proverbial garbage. But when you stop and consider how much money companies that specialize in waste management these days, chances are that managing the backup and recovery process is actually one of the best opportunities in the channel to generate some seriously high margin revenue.