An IT services provider poll by N-able has reflected the increased need to consider backup away from the corporate network in response to increasing threats such as ransomware.
Eric Harless, a “head nerd” for backup at N-able, said: “Ransomware threats show how important it is to store backups off the local network, which is why an appliance-free, direct-to-cloud approach is the best approach.”
N-able quizzed about 100 MSPs at one of its bootcamps about their backup provision and the profitability of backup services. Three in four said backup was a profitable offering for them but indicated that “issues” exist around pricing and costs of service delivery, according to N-able.
“Fifty-seven percent of survey participants agreed their backup retention policies were constrained by local storage capacity. The wrong policies have the potential to make costs higher than expected or break service level agreements (SLAs),” the vendor said.
Forty-five percent of MSPs surveyed agreed that backup appliances can be an expensive way to protect data — with local, physical storage making for “a heavy lift” when it came to managing and maintaining data.
N-able is promoting cloud-first data protection, reducing the requirement for storage management and software upgrades or patches, among other infrastructure-related tasks.
Cloud backup as opposed to remote cloud storage as a secondary or optional step can offer a “more efficient architecture” that enables faster, more frequent backups and lower storage consumption per restore point, according to N-able.
“Every business has its own needs, but given the prevalence of ransomware that can attack backup files on the local network, cloud storage should be the default for data protection and local storage a secondary option,” argued Harless.
Leigh Johnson, IT and compliance head at A&O IT Group, noted in the N-able announcement that backup can be the difference between a business surviving or not in the face of disaster.
“Those [MSPs] that are not making a profit need to control costs, set prices that are fair, and educate their customers on the value of backup,” according to Johnson.
( Image by Larisa Koshkina from Pixabay )
