Leveraging the Channel to Drive Backup and Recovery into the Cloud

One thing that is becoming increasingly clear is that IT organizations are not particularly good at backup and recovery. Whether that’s because they have more important things to do or because the sheer amount of data that needs to backed is overwhelming them doesn’t really matter all the much. What matters is that providing backup and recovery as a cloud computing service has become a major opportunity for the channel.

According to Eran Farajun, executive vice president of Asigra, a provider of backup and recovery software that is designed to be deployed as a service, too many solution providers overlook the opportunities created by taking over the less glamorous tasks of IT management. If backup is done at all, it’s usually the job of the lowest guy on the IT totem pole. In recent years, however, the IT totem pole has gotten a lot shorter, which means that there may be nobody backing up data at any kind of regular interval.

Farajun says this creates an ideal scenario for solution providers in the channel that want to deliver some initial cloud computing service. Rather than trying to usurp the role of the internal IT organization, Farajun says it’s a lot easier to find some initial success by simply offering services that either complement what the internal IT department does already or, better yet, perform a task they really don’t want to do at all.

Most IT organizations tend to view backup as a chore. As the amount of data that needs to be managed continues to grow, that task is becoming more difficult. And yet the impact of downtime on the business in the digital age can be more catastrophic than ever, which means the ability to actually recover a particular file is more important.

In fact, Farajun says most businesses don’t pay enough attention to the recovery process. Farajun says Asigra differentiates itself by not only providing an agentless approach to backup that reduces the IT overhead for the solution provider, but also offer more granular points of recovery that are less susceptible to being corrupted.

No one is ever going to become famous because of their ability to do backups. But when it comes time to recover a file, it gives solution providers an opportunity to shine in a way that not only gains the customer’s trust, but also creates an opportunity for new business once that trust is established.