Channel organizations that have expanded into disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) are seeing a high return on their investment via increased revenue, new customers and improved customer retention.

That’s according to a survey of 50 U.S.-based IT organizations, including MSPs and VARs, by StorageCraft. The survey included both customers of StorageCraft’s DRaaS and customers of other DRaaS providers.

StorageCraft’s Shridar Subramanian

Shridar Subramanian, StorageCraft’s vice president of marketing and product management, tells Channel Partners that partners who are concerned about protecting their customers’ data, not just in the data center but also in the cloud, are opting to offer DRaaS.

“There are a few customers who really don’t care for this, primarily because they may not be too dependent on their data for running their business-critical or even for running their business in general, so for those folks this may not be much of a value-added option,” he said. “But for most of the customers who really depend on information and data, this is something that they find extremely valuable.”

When asked about customer revenue, wins and retention due to adding DRaaS, two-thirds (66 percent) of respondents reported an increase in revenue per customer, 63 percent reported improved customer retention and 23 percent reported they have won new customers, according to the survey.

When asked about the impact of DRaaS on quarterly revenue, 15 percent reported increased quarterly revenue of between 11 and 19 percent, and 41 percent reported increased quarterly revenue of between 6 and 10 percent.

The increase in customer retention is because it “sends a message to their customers of, ‘hey, I as an MSP am really concerned about your data and hence I can be a partner that you can continue to trust,’ and because of the fact that the data is now more protected, more companies are more comfortable with those MSPs and the other services that they offer,”  Subramanian said.

The global DRaaS market is expected to grow from $2 billion in 2016 to $19 billion by 2024, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 35 percent, according to Variant Market Research. Strict regulations governing disaster recovery and increasing adoption of cloud-based services are the major drivers in the market.

“Most companies … are getting buried in a ton of volume of data and they’re actually finding it difficult to figure out what is important and what is not important,” Subramanian said. “So in the absence of such intelligence, they just want to protect everything because they don’t know when they may need it. They may need it to run their business or for regulatory compliance requirements, there so many regulations coming up, and so keeping that data accessible is becoming extremely important for most companies.”