In theory cloud computing should provide greater efficiencies by allowing MSPs to centralize the management of data in as few data centers as possible. In reality, all kinds of laws and regulations are conspiring to force MSPs to manage data within the local jurisdiction of multiple countries around the world. As a result of this “data sovereignty” issue, MSPs now often have to manage data across multiple data centers around the globe.

Acronis data center expansion

As a provider of data protection services that MSPs can resell, Acronis has announced it is rising to that challenge by expanding the network of data centers it manages into Germany and Japan. Acronis already has data centers in Russia, France, Singapore and the United States.

Via Acronis Backup as a Service MSPs can rely on a turnkey solution hosted in Acronis data centers or opt to deploy a hybrid model through which they can make use of a management console hosted by Acronis to leverage local storage resources. John Zanni, senior vice president for cloud and hosting sales for Acronis, said the latter approach makes it easier for MSPs to leverage local storage to meet recovery time and point objectives while still leveraging the cloud to cut overall data storage costs.

nScaled acquisition

Of course, that’s only one approach to data protection in the cloud. Acronis also recently acquired nScaled through which it provides a service that allows organizations to replicate data between to concurrent images of the same application running in multiple data centers. Should the local data center become unavailable, users accessing that application are automatically routed over to a secondary data center.

Taken together and it becomes clear that distributed data centers in the cloud are changing the way data protection is delivered and managed. The challenge for MSPs is the delivering those services on their own requires a capital investment in data center or deploying a variety of data protection software applications across multiple instances of public cloud computing services. In contrast, Zanni said the Acronis model provides a more turnkey approach to data protection in the cloud that MSPs of any size can manage.

In the meantime, solution providers across the channel should pay close attention to how the evolution of data protection as service affects the overall market. With more data protection being delivered via the cloud it may now be only a matter of time before the dozen of vendors that provide data protection software in one form or another begin to consolidate in a way that could result in channel partners suddenly looking for another data protection solution in a hurry.