Ben Cuppello – Sales Director
Firstly allow me to caveat…your view on the topic at hand is likely to depend on whether or not you are looking at the topic as a vendor, reseller or service provider leveraging vendor technology to deliver a managed service. I myself sit in the camp of a service provider – leveraging Arcserve technology to provide BaaS and DRaaS through the reseller channel.
There is no doubt that current technology and ever decreasing storage costs are making the prospect of leveraging a cloud based service for offsite backups more realistic, and a valid alternative to traditional tape based solutions. However should this cloud platform be provided by the backup vendor themselves? A partner MSP? If the vendor cultivates a network of MSP’s to offer the service should they then build their own, essentially competing with the partners they have previously encouraged? What would the end user prefer? What boxes does this platform need to tick for it to become a viable option?
We believe that in order to drive adoption of a cloud platform amongst end users it needs to provide a stable, cost effective option with tight integration into the backup technology along with the ability to satisfy compliance and security requirements. It also needs to be adequately supported by a responsive support team who are available around the clock.
An example of an organisation who delivers an effective solution would be Datto, however they have always attached a cloud offering to their appliances and never sought to develop MSP’s to leverage their technology as part of their own offering.
Arcserve technology is perfectly suited to delivering BaaS & DRaaS solutions with its ability to target almost any infrastructure endpoint, flexible deployment options, simple multi tenant reporting and slick service provider license model. Core DataCloud have built an offering which we successfully deliver to several hundred servers across multiple clients. Traditionally Arcserve have been a channel led software provider, having recently entered the appliance market they have now announced the availability of their own cloud platform in the US.
At this stage the platform is US only, meaning it’s impractical for the majority of UK based organisations to adopt, however it clearly represents a concern for us as its release in the UK could create a competitor out of one of our key vendor partners. Will there be features that are not made available to us which leave us at a disadvantage? How will it be priced?
The above is designed to be thought provoking rather than provide answers – I’m interested to see how people feel on this matter and whether or not, from a vendor perspective, it would be more profitable to grow their MSP network rather than create their own offering.
