As the channel landscape grows increasingly complex, vendors must truly understand the market — and their partners' customers — to provide value. That's true for data protection and backup services alike, though changes in buying behavior have altered the definition of a strategic relationship between vendors and their managed service provider (MSP) partners. Here, Ashar Baig, research director at Gigaom Research and a channel expert, explains the data protection challenges MSPs' customers face, how vendors can help their partners help themselves and what MSPs look for in a vendor partner.

Unless you've been living underneath a rock for the past two weeks, you've no doubt heard about the panic that the Heartbleed bug has caused among Internet users. MSPs can assuage their customers' concerns by providing them the information they need. Here's the latest on Heartbleed and more data protection news from around the Web this week:

A dedicated IT team can help a small business scale and grow quickly, but it's not a luxury all SMBs can afford. But the ever-present threat of a computer crash or other data disasters mean that businesses can't afford not to invest in some kind of IT solution. For many, this means outsourcing at least a portion of IT infrastructure to cloud and other third-party vendors.

After 13 years, Microsoft finally discontinued support and security updates for Windows XP on April 8th. While the sunset date was no secret, nearly 28 percent of the world’s computers still rely on the massively popular operating system.