Affordable Storage and Backup Services Create Opportunities, Challenges for MSPs and CSPs

Providing affordable storage and backup services is an excellent way for managed service providers (MSP) and cloud service providers (CSP) to add revenue-generating services to their offerings. But offering these services in a cost-effective and efficient manner can also present a major challenge for service providers, and they must plan and design their service offerings carefully.

Online backup is the initial entry path to the cloud for most organizations, and it also provides a great mechanism for storage resellers to transition to an MSP model. However, off-the-shelf backup software and hardware isn't necessarily a good option for a service provider operation that requires adding customers and scaling bandwidth and services incrementally.

While there are many MSP backup applications available, they’re often geared toward consumers and don't provide the robust features many businesses require. As increasingly sophisticated business customers look to MSPs for the storage needs, service providers need to be able to meet the demands brought by virtualization and an increasing usage of databases within the SMB marketplace.

An additional business opportunity exists for CSPs as data centers look to move beyond the cloud for secondary data. Data center providers are increasingly using CSPs to host their applications as well as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings, which may be hosted by MSPs and CSPs.

Primary data storage is a bigger challenge for service providers, however, as all processing and related storage I/O is performed locally. Using the latency of the Internet as an excuse for cheaper and far removed storage just isn't an option.

High-performance storage is needed, but service providers must purchase it in a manner that matches their business model, so that storage and capacity may be scaled up or down as customer demands require it. And this type of storage is too expensive to buy upfront, so an incremental approach is definitely necessary.

By employing software-defined storage, CSPs may converge their compute and storage infrastructures to enable a simple and cost-effective upgrade.