By Pavan Vyas, Product Marketing Manager, Asigra
As you look to expand your managed service practice, should you be looking at offering cloud services, specifically cloud backup? With the rapid growth of both structured and unstructured data taking place in organizations today, companies are struggling with protecting this data. In specific verticals such as financial services and healthcare, organizations must even have a data protection strategy in place for compliance purposes. These data points may cause you to have a number of questions – the foremost being – Is offering cloud backup and recovery services lucrative? Can I make money offering cloud backup services? The answer to both those questions is “Yes”.
In this blog post, I am going to provide you with some tips and point you to a great resource that can help you with taking this all important business decision. As a company that has helped numerous service providers across the world make the move to the cloud and build successful cloud backup and recovery services using our enterprise software platform, we know that the cloud backup market is not for everyone. So, who makes an ideal candidate for offering cloud backup services? How do you decide if it is the right business venture for you?
As always the first step in any such process is, understanding your current business situation and your customers’ needs. There are about seven critical questions that you should be asking yourself such as “Do you have customers in highly regulated industries”? or “On an average how much incremental backup data do your customers generate each month?”. You can find those questions in this paper titled “Assessing your cloud backup opportunity”. As you go through this assessment, not only will you determine if offering cloud backup services is right for your business, you will also uncover new ways of thinking about your customers. This can help you grow your business with your existing customers, develop strategies for attracting new customers and obtain higher levels of customer satisfaction.
In this process of self discovery, if you ever need any help in understanding where you stand vis-à-vis your customers’ needs, we suggest that you reach out to some of your largest and trusted customers. By engaging them through surveys, interviews, or even one-on-one discussions, you can get any data points that you don’t have or answer questions that you are struggling with by yourself.
As important as it is that cloud backup services make sense to your customers, it is also critical that cloud backup services fit in with the rest of your practice today – both technologically and psychologically. It is essential that your customers can feel comfortable in trusting you to keep their critical business data – the lifeblood of their business – safe. It is also important that their current experience in working with you paves the way towards their having that confidence in you. We have a set of questions that can help you determine if cloud backup fits in well with your existing business and if this is the right time for you to proceed on making it a core component of your service offerings. Make sure to spend some time thinking through those questions.
Cloud backup managed services offers tremendous opportunities for service providers like you. We can vouch for this based on the experience of service providers in our own ecosystem. We are sure our paper will help you make the right business decisions about entering the cloud backup and recovery market, just like it has done for so many of our hybrid partners over the decades!