The CP List: 20 Top Backup/Disaster Recovery Providers You Should Know

Backup and disaster recovery, which includes various types of partners, is an increasingly competitive marketplace, and it’s getting more and more difficult for players to differentiate and successfully market their products and services.

Recent acquisitions, such as Autotask buying Datto and InterVision buying Bluelock, are shifting the competitive landscape. And demand for data protection continues to escalate.

Pax8’s Jennifer Bodell

Analysts, members of the Channel Partners Editorial Advisory Board and other industry experts shared their views with us on what it takes to succeed in backup and disaster recovery, whether you’re a vendor, MSP or reseller.

“A successful, cutting-edge backup and disaster-recovery (BDR) provider doesn’t change at its core, but is constantly adding new features and enhancements to stay ahead of the curve in the ever-changing landscape of IT,” said Jennifer Bodell, Pax8‘s vice president of channel, and editorial advisory board member. “IT interruptions from power outages, cyberattacks, hardware failure and natural disasters can grind business down to a halt. But by leveraging a successful disaster-recovery solution, you are helping your customers reduce costs of downtime and ensuring they will be back up and running within minutes. For example, it is a BDR best practice to back up onsite and replicate that data off-site to a secondary location. That is why it is so essential for BDR providers to offer a cloud solution.”

The 2112 Group’s Larry Walsh

From a service provider-technology delivery standpoint, success is active engagement in the customer’s backup and recovery needs,” said Larry Walsh, CEO and chief analyst of The 2112 Group, and editorial advisory board member.

“This means having a full breadth of managed and professional services that start with needs assessment, to architecture and infrastructure development/optimization, proactive managed services in which the MSP is engaged in monitoring activity, troubleshooting problems and anticipating future needs,” he said. “On top of that, [there’s] providing ongoing professional services to optimize the engagement and balancing costs, conducting periodic audits, conducting periodic drills to practice recovery in the event of a disaster, and capacity planning for future needs.”

The key challenge in the market is that the leaders are gaining big market share, said Josh Lupresto, Telarus’ vice president of sales engineering.

Telarus’ Josh Lupresto

“DR is so critical; if the IT professional makes a bad selection, then has an outage and can’t recover, their job could be at risk,” he said. “In that case, even if a new technology comes out, it’s going to take significant time to gain market share because those customers are not willing to be the guinea pig in the equation.”

Phil Goodwin, IDC’s research director of cloud data management and protection, said the market likely will continue to grow and “we’re not yet in a consolidation phase.”

“A really important part of it is the on-boarding process for the provider,” he said. “It’s a lot of of the upfront effort that goes into a successful disaster recovery solution. And then the second part of that is having effective testing mechanisms once applications are hosted in the recovery site. Does the provider have things like a pre-flight check to make sure that all of the components are up to date and available for a disaster recovery test? And then actually to perhaps provide simulated testing so that the DR testing is non-impactful to the organization? And the third is an actual, full-blown disaster recovery test. Where you do failover — make sure that everything’s working that should and that if a disaster does strike, any kind of failover will be successful.”

Forrester’s Jay McBain

Based on feedback from analysts, editorial advisory board members, recent news reports and Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Disaster Recovery as a Service report, we’ve compiled a list, in no particular order, of 20 backup and disaster-recovery providers that are making the most of the current competitive landscape and charting success.

Click through our gallery below to see who made it and why.

Follow senior contributing editor @EdwardGately on Twitter.