Best MSP Backup Solution: A Reference Guide

Your managed service provider (MSP) business thrives by expanding the breadth and depth of the services offered to your customers. These expansions represent an opportunity to entice new prospects and deepen your relationship with existing customers. And few MSP software and services are in more demand today than online backup services.

In fact, according to an MMR report, the backup as a service (BaaS) market is expected to reach a value of $25.43 billion by 2029, at a CAGR of 32% for the 2023-2029 period. This growth makes sense, given the exponential growth cloud computing is seeing and the increasingly complex cyber threat landscape that your clients and prospects face today.

Despite such forecasts, many MSPs are unsure if managed online backup services suit their portfolio. Online backup software is a low-hanging fruit for MSPs looking to expand, and organizations are adopting online backup software, cloud storage, and cloud disaster recovery with more confidence and comfort than ever before.

If your MSP business isn't selling online backup software, there are several reasons why you should. In this reference guide, we'll explore a few.

• Why are your clients so interested in online backup services?
• How can you both benefit from integrating online backup services?
• How to find the right online backup software for your service portfolio? and
• How to profit with online backup software?

Businesses and organizations benefit from a managed backup solution provided by a third-party managed service provider. As many MSPs are offering top-notch services, you need to stand out from the crowd.

Your MSP business must ensure the most comprehensive backup solutions are available to your clients. This includes local storage options, a cloud backup solution, remote physical servers support, and more. Nonetheless, backup options aren't enough to satisfy a rapidly evolving business.

MSPs must rely on a top-tier online backup solution to support advanced cybersecurity features and additional benefits to protect clients' data.

Let's explore the primary benefits of a robust MSP backup solution so you can make sure your offerings tick all the boxes.

Typically, cloud backup software is the most significant advantage of managed backup services. It diversifies your clients' backup strategy and offers quick recovery options and virtually unlimited scalability. However, before we discuss cloud backups in-depth, let's review several other benefits of MSP business backup.

Local (on-premises) data storage requires infrastructure, monitoring, and management. If a company needs to expand, it must purchase and install additional hardware (servers, modems) and potentially hire more staff to handle local storage.

On the other hand, managed service providers often offer a customizable pricing model. Flexible licensing enables companies to pay only for the features and infrastructure they use without upfront fees or set long-term contracts. Depending on their current backup loads, they can easily manage their storage needs and scale down or up.

IT compliance requirements are a cornerstone of successful business growth, especially in heavily regulated industries. (finance, healthcare)

A reliable MSP can manage all compliance requirements, so their business clients can focus on core processes and critical projects. Most MSP solutions implement several layers of cybersecurity to protect client data - two-factor authentication, end-to-end encryption, EDR, and more. This way, company data and applications are secured against human error and cyber threats.

Robust MSPs provide a dedicated team to monitor, manage, and support their client's cloud backup storage. They ensure the company network is secure, while EDR tools scour all endpoints to detect emerging threats to provide end-to-end data protection.

Even if the company system suffers from a zero-day attack or is compromised due to human error, MSP recovery solutions will work relentlessly to restore lost files and bring systems up as soon as possible.

A smaller business typically relies on a single individual (or a small team of two-three people) to manage their cybersecurity needs. However, sophisticated cyber attacks can easily overwhelm a limited workforce.

MSPs proactively monitor company facilities, data centers, local backup servers, and cloud storage. If issues arise, the MSP can quickly remediate them and keep you in the loop via smart alerts and reports.

RTO and RPO are critical KPIs to measure your disaster recovery strategy. RTO relates to how much time your company can afford to lose before resuming day-to-day operations. RPO represents the maximum data amount (measured via downtime) your company can afford to lose following a system failure or a data-loss event.

A managed backup solution will ensure company data is backed up as frequently as needed to support business continuity and a steady revenue stream in case of a disaster.

In-house IT teams are typically tasked with many day-to-day processes and critical projects. Reliable MSP services can free the internal IT workforce from dedicated backup monitoring so they can focus on core business tasks.

Potentially the biggest benefit your MSP can offer is peace of mind. Company data and networks are monitored continuously and secured from cyber attacks, natural disasters, and ransomware, combined with a sound disaster recovery plan, to ensure the company can deny downtime and maintain positive customer feedback.

Almost two decades ago, cloud backup was the "new solution on the block". Since then, many cloud backup providers have emerged, and cloud backups have become a pillar in sensible data protection and recovery services.

Cloud backup software enables users to back up data from anywhere, anytime. Some cloud backup services offer backup to public clouds, while other solutions have their own servers to support secure backups and convenient recovery.

Aside from the obvious benefits, cloud storage enables MSPs to provide top-tier services for business clients. Let's explore them below.

Managed cloud backup solutions have brought enterprise-tier backups to a new level compared to physical servers and tape backups. The most compelling features for your MSP's clients are:

• The cost reduction from not having to set up and maintain local backup infrastructure
• The effort, time, and cost reduction from not having to secure and transport tape backups
• The more streamlined process to meeting compliance requirements
• The ease of browsing and locating required business information
• The option to implement multi-site backup to satisfy the 3-2-1 Rule of Backup

Moreover, your MSP can rely on a multi-purpose cloud backup solution to provide enhanced cybersecurity to client networks. This way, they don't have to purchase multiple license keys to activate separate licenses regarding backup and data protection. With a dedicated solution, MSPs can manage cyber threats, support efficiency, and securely store backups to a fortified cloud.

Virtual machines are utilized by many modern businesses to increase efficiency. VM backup solutions can create full, incremental, and differential backups for virtual machines and store them in secure cloud backups.

In a downtime event, your clients can restore VM backups instantaneously within a secondary environment to minimize downtime if their primary networks are compromised.

Online backup software helps to ensure that your MSP business can provide robust, modern protection for your clients. This is key given the variety of threats your customers and prospects face today, the highly competitive nature of the MSP market, and the rapidly growing scale and sophistication of your customers' IT environments.

By securing copies of your customers' data in remote data centers, managed online backup services offer greater protection and more comprehensively support the enormous volumes of data your clients create, share, and store on any given day. The modern digital world makes this feature of online backup software both a vital differentiator for your MSP and a crucial part of any cyber protection strategy, as these vast backup libraries now need to be available 24/7 on an increasingly growing variety of devices and endpoints worldwide.

Being an MSP in 2023 is more challenging than in 2022 – and much more complicated than five or ten years ago – but a managed online backup service makes it easier.

By offering online backup software as part of your service portfolio, your MSP business is positioned at the forefront of modern data protection efforts – something your existing and potential customers are increasingly seeking. Many established providers in the MSP industry identify security and backup as some of their customers' key focuses today.

Managed cloud backup services enable you to address both of these concerns with a single solution that offers another layer of data protection – and thereby a more robust online backup defense – and the added security benefits of public or private cloud storage.

Moreover, remote backup software for service providers is often a quick and easy upsell opportunity, particularly for customers who rely on you for traditional backup support, restoration, and disaster recovery services.

For a few tips on marketing your new managed online backup services, read on.

Online backup services offer three key benefits for your existing and prospective customers: a reliable way to meet compliance regulations consistently, the highest possible data availability, and the ability to overcome the evolving cyber threat landscape.

Many online backup software vendors design their online backup services to comply with regulations, including the USA's Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As a result, offering online backup for business customers ensures consistent compliance and reduces the time and budget customers need to spend addressing this concern.

By diversifying where your customers' backup data is stored, managed cloud backup services ensure that mass hardware failure, localized service interruptions, and natural disasters don't derail their businesses. This benefit of online backup software makes your MSP business look like a hero while providing your customers with near-seamless data availability.

Online backup software can represent a valuable first step to fighting ransomware, offering a reliable means to quickly recover stolen or compromised data wherever needed. This ability is critical to modern business IT since there's now a ransomware attack every 11 seconds. Each can result in $4.54 million in total costs (excluding the ransom payout). That said, anti-ransomware capabilities vary between managed online backup services and vendors.

Together, these three key customer benefits of managed online backup services provide a clear-cut story for investing in your MSP's online backup services. The only question is finding the right one to meet their expectations and deliver your business the best resource, experience, and value.

Not all online backup services are equal. Remote backup software for service providers is available from an increasingly wide variety of vendors, which opens more opportunities for you to choose the right one for your and your customers' needs. Of course, with more options comes more risk of choice paralysis. This is particularly true for MSPs because the wrong online backup software can cost you deployment, training, and management time and money, frustrating you later and potentially costing you customers.

When deciding on managed online backup services to sell, look for online backup software that drives your business toward complete cyber protection. In the modern era of cyber threats, online data backup alone is not enough. To provide the best resource possible for your customers – while making the most profit for your own MSP business – you should invest in online backup software that provides:

Today, online backup for business customers should offer built-in features, including anti-malware and blockchain-based file notarization, and support military-grade encryption to make backup defenses as robust and all-inclusive as possible. Online backup services with these features make it easier to keep your customers' data compliant with regulations and verify its authenticity.

To make your online backup software as valuable as possible for customers, regardless of their environment arrangement, identify a solution that can support as many unique systems as possible. That includes physical, virtual, cloud, and mobile workloads and popular platforms and applications like SAP HANA, Oracle, Microsoft 365, Azure, and Google Workspace.

Online backup software is widely available, but not all are created equal. Remote backup software for service providers should include built-in capabilities to streamline your usage and management with features like a multi-client portal, a multi-service platform, easy service provisioning, white-labeling, RMM/PSA integrations, and pay-as-you-go pricing models.

Online backup software should be as valuable and convenient for your team as it is for your customers. Finding online backup services with a modern user interface (single-pane management) and no need to install or maintain software or hardware simplifies your management needs. It also reduces your hardware and workforce expenses.

As we detailed above, with platform protection, the managed online backup services you add to your portfolio should account for a wide variety of storage solutions, both in response to data regulations and to factor in the storage preferences of your customers. Seek out online backup services with ready-to-use access to scalable local and third-party off-site storage and cloud seeding options for more efficient backups of extensive information volumes.

Once you've selected an online backup software vendor to expand your portfolio, you can start selling.

Your customers and prospects do business in a digital world that's growing more complex, expensive, and insecure. By managing their IT services, you're already poised to be the saving grace that removes all these concerns and provides reliability and confidence in their place.

Adding managed online backup services fits perfectly into this narrative, a natural progression of data protection combined with cybersecurity to become something more robust than both – cyber protection.

When selling your customers on the importance of online backup services, three key points to highlight are:

Online backup software ensures more consistent data availability that helps your customers stay productive no matter what. As more and more businesses take to the cloud, managed cloud backup software is going to become more necessary.

Your online backup services eliminate security gaps that may exist with specific apps and systems. Additionally, leading online backup software features integrate cybersecurity defenses that help to combat today's sophisticated cyber threats.

Regulations like HIPAA and GDPR are not to be ignored. Managed online backup services, as part of your service portfolio offerings, help ensure that your customers are consistently in compliance with their industry regulations so they don't need to sweat.

Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud unites backup and disaster recovery, next-generation anti-malware enhanced with machine intelligence, and endpoint protection management in one solution. Integration and automation provide unmatched ease for service providers — reducing complexity while increasing productivity and decreasing operating costs. Key features include:

Minimize data loss across your clients' infrastructure and workloads with the best backup and recovery technology available in consumption-based or per-workload licensing models.

Stay ahead of modern cyber threats with award-winning anti-ransomware enhanced with anti-malware capabilities focused on zero-day threats that complement your clients' antivirus.

Allow customers and disaster recovery (DR)-enabled tenants to establish secure connections to the corporate network with their personal devices or test failover in an isolated network environment.

Centralize your protection management and provision endpoints in minutes. Remotely assist clients and assess system vulnerabilities and security gaps. You will also increase visibility with built-in monitoring and reporting.

Increase productivity by enabling your clients to create and securely share corporate content from anywhere, anytime, and on any device. Only get charged for the storage you use. Your clients can also leverage notarization and eSignature for data validation.

You can also expand your services to your clients with advanced protection packs:

Paired with Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, the Advanced Backup pack enables you to extend the cloud backup capabilities your clients need to protect their data proactively.

The Advanced Security pack extends the endpoint protection capabilities of Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, enabling you to lower the risks for your clients with enhanced anti-malware protection and remediation services. The advanced pack simplifies deployment, configuration, and management tasks with advanced integration and automation.

Protect your clients' workloads when disaster strikes by instantly spinning up systems with cloud-based recovery and restoring them anywhere. When you add Advanced Disaster Recovery to Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, you can easily extend the cloud recovery services your clients need.

Interested in learning more? See what you can do for your MSP business today.