MSPs Can Benefit from Booming Demand for Storage as a Service

Lower costs. That’s where a value-added STaaS offering comes in, because it can help SMBs meet their storage needs and grow their business. SMBs can reap benefits from a robust, scalable storage solution that eases the management headaches that come with traditional storage.

Scalable capacity: As an MSP, you can deliver this to your SMB customers. With storage-as-a-service, you can offer SMBs the opportunity to access high-quality, scalable storage. Better still, you can offer SMBs the flexibility to pay only for what they need, when they need it, without incurring any up-front costs. With STaaS, SMBs can easily throttle their storage requirements up or down as their capacity needs change. It’s a very attractive proposition for a growing business: storage at a price that is significantly lower than the cost of owning and maintaining an in-house storage infrastructure.

Better data storage and management capabilities: Low cost and flexibility aren’t the only reasons STaaS is increasingly appealing to SMBs. New data privacy laws, such as Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and other nation-specific regulations that prevent data leaving the country, are putting stringent data storage requirements on businesses. Even the smallest businesses must now comply or face stiff penalties. Thus, a third value that MSPs can offer is to help SMBs better store and manage their data and remain in compliance with rules like the GDPR.

Ease of use. This factor is crucial. If you’re an MSP, you’re probably already stretched to capacity and you don’t have spare resources to allocate to deploy and manage your storage service. With the right storage solution, such as scale-out storage appliances, you can plug-and-play with the ability to “bring your own disks.” Scale-out storage allows you to mix-and-match drives of different capacities and types (SAS, SATA) in the same bays and with zero configuration. This means no RAID, volume or logical unit numbers (LUNs) to configure. These scale-out storage solutions give you the power to manage the storage needs of your customers in any location, from any browser, so you spend less time managing storage and more time driving strategic initiatives.

High scalability. There are MSPs that get engaged in data projects that, suddenly, require a much larger team and a new budget because they didn’t realize the customers’ data needs were going to grow so fast and become so unwieldy. There is a better way. Choose a highly-scalable data storage solution that keeps pace with customers’ data growth, which is often more than 100 percent per year. The right storage solution will allow you to cost-effectively add any number of drives, anytime and in any granularity, to meet the storage requirements of your customers. And you can grow your global storage pool with zero configuration and no application downtime.

Intelligent analytics. Look for a self-organizing storage solution that applies analytics and machine learning to the management of information. Ideally, such a storage system will use analytics to identify the data that should be backed up and data that needn’t be, giving you an intelligent, tiered data architecture that provides rapid access to mission-critical information. This is the only way that MSPs and their customers are going to keep up with the explosion of data, especially now that the data deluge is coming bigger and faster than humans can handle.

Strong data protection. Finally, you need to always keep your customers’ data safe and available. If you don’t, you will quickly lose their business, not to mention place them (and you) at risk of regulatory trouble. That’s why it’s important to ensure that your data storage offerings also include the ability to protect business data wherever it lives and guarantee that it’s always available no matter what happens. The best solutions use snapshot, replication and encryption technologies and can also recover individual files, entire systems, or fail over a whole data center very quickly.