As the New Year approaches, everyone and his brother comes out with predictions. Cloud backup provider Zetta.net did the opposite, releasing what it calls “non-predictions” for MSPs, and added to them five trends of vital importance now that we are in 2014.
The notion of non-predictions refers to things MSPs did last year they ought not to repeat this year if they want to make more money and have less customer and product turnover. Starting at the bottom, number seven, is that MSPs often buy way more backup appliances than they actually need, even when providing supposedly super-efficient cloud services.
Number six is assuming that customers aren’t concerned with shrinking their backup windows. They should be if they want to restore current data and do so quickly.
Next up the rung is not taking HIPAA seriously enough. Not only are there hefty fines at stake, not being compliant means critical data is neither secure nor confidential.
Number four is related to the backup windows, but focuses on restore. “Businesses are just saying NO to speed and performance because it's ok to wait weeks to restore data,” the company said. The key to fast backups and speedy restores is deduplication, where a small fraction of the full data volumes are sent up and down the pipe.
What is non-prediction three? “Complexity rules! Having to log into multiple servers across all your clients various locations keeps you close to their heart,” Zetta.net said. For MSPs time is always of the essence, but too often they choose technologies that waste countless man hours.
“Time doesn't equal money -- It's a boatload of fun taking hours to install backup agents, create the jobs and do multiple reboots just to get your backup started,” reads item two.
The last one is a bit of an inside joke. “Symantec Backup Exec.cloud resurrects as Norton.cloud to test your patience, yet again!”
5 Real Predictions
The company made 5 actual predictions, which include:
5. “Cloud backup support for transferring larger data sets will need to be faster as customer demand increases for data availability.
4. Enterprise-grade cloud backups will ditch appliances to reduce complexity and eliminate initial cost of entry for MSPs.
3. The race for customer loyalty increases from 0 to 60 mph in three seconds as MSPs focus efforts on reducing churn with the right cloud offering -- backup leads the charge.
2. Backup reliability will increase with the wide adoption of cloud backup services.
1. 2014 will be the year of disaster recovery-as-a-service as the need to instantly restore data becomes mainstream.”
What Zetta.net Does
Zetta.net sells disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) tools to MSPs, what it calls a 3-in-1 hybrid cloud system that includes backup, archiving and the disaster recovery piece. There are another 3 pieces the company likes to tout: its software, online storage and WAN optimization to make backup and recovery faster.
The main tool, Zetta.net DataProtect, does remote server backup, local backup, archiving, backup and replication offsite, disaster recovery, bare metal recovery, and the company claims, instant recovery.
The five year-old company was launched by former EMC, Netscape, Symantec and VeriSign executives.
MSP Help on the Way
Zetta.net recently unveiled a new Managed Service Provider Marketing Enablement and Lead Generation Program which offers help with leads, landing customers and increasing conversion rates.
“Marketing practices are experiencing disruptive change,” said Gary Sevounts, vice president of marketing, Zetta.net. “Older techniques such as cold calling, spamming and trade show exhibits yield increasingly less results, require large budgets and waste valuable resources. A majority of IT decision makers are increasingly using search engines, IT communities, peer and media reviews. Zetta.net has embraced the new inbound marketing model, which leads potential customers to our web site through the availability of relevant, educational content - and then they contact us when ready. This approach has generated strong results and we look forward to sharing many of the inbound marketing techniques and best practices responsible for these results, with our partners”
So what does Zetta mean? According to elaborate research by MSP Today, it is ten to the 21st power or one sextillion.
Edited by
Cassandra Tucker
