There are three things you need in order to turn a technology concept into a viable revenue-generating services business:

The market opportunity

Disaster recovery (as a whole) and DRaaS continue to gain momentum with small and midsize businesses, thanks to more affordable prices and enhanced functionality. In fact, Gartner estimates the DRaaS market will nearly triple in the next three years, to a revenue point of $3.4 billion by 2019. But the growth isn’t only in small to midsize businesses. In addition, DRaaS interest has grown significantly among large enterprises during the past year, Gartner has witnessed a 77% increase in inquiries from these organizations throughout 2015.¹

The building blocks

The bedrock of any BDR (backup and disaster recovery) service or data protection service comes from its backbone data protection technology–the crossroads where backup, availability and granular recoverability meet.

In addition, it is often said that companies have too much invested in their existing backup solution, or don’t want to learn a new backup UI and recreate jobs and install agents again. This means you need to align with a company that already has a strong imprint in the market–maximizing your potential piece of the pie.

To date, there are more than 11,200 cloud and service providers that entrust Veeam and have built their services businesses to be Veeam-powered. Veeam also benefits from another, possibly even more impressive, growing ecosystem: It provides on-premises backup and replication software to almost 200,000 end users worldwide. What if a technology was created where the 11,200 service providers could benefit from the 200,000 end users, and vice versa? Well, it has.

Veeam Cloud Connect provides a simple, fully integrated way for end users to get their backups and replication offsite without needing to build and maintain a secondary data center.

It also provides a tremendous business venture for service providers: a way to offer disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and hosted off-site backups (sometimes referred to a storage as a service for data protection, or STaaS/DP) to Veeam users looking to extend their on-premises solution to the cloud.

Execute, automate and scale

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”
– T.E. Lawrence “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”

Once you’ve armed yourself with industry-leading data protection technology (hint: think green), then it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get to work. Here are a few tips to consider when targeting today’s modern data centers for BDR services:

In addition, you must be prepared for multiple conversations with multiple roles before you get to a “yes.” Consider it as more of a collective decision making process where any one person might have veto power, versus a linear approach.

Here are two great MSPMentor resources on automation:

Conclusion

By capitalizing on a new market opportunity with the right building blocks and speed-to-market, you can scale your business for long-term success. To learn more about how Veeam can help service providers, visit https://www.veeam.com/service-providers.html.

_{1Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service, John P Morency, Christine Tenneson, Ron Blair, 16 June 2016.}

_{2STaaS/dp: Adding cloud storage to an on-premises data protection solution.}

Russ Kerscher is Senior Global Product Marketing Manager for Veeam Software, a provider of Availability for the Always-On Enterprise, helping organizations meet recovery time and point objectives (RTPO) of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data.