A survey of 50 channel organizations in the U.S. published this week by StorageCraft, a provider of data protection delivered via the cloud, suggests cloud services are rapidly becoming table stakes for solution providers if they hope to retain their clients.
Almost a third of the survey respondents (32%) said they would view themselves as being at a competitive disadvantage without being able to offer cloud services.
Over two-thirds of solution providers that did embrace cloud services reported either improved customer retention (63%) or increased revenue per customer (66%). A total of 41 percent reported increased quarterly revenues of between six to ten percent, while 15 percent had increased revenues between 11 to 19 percent.
But less than a quarter of respondents (23%) reported they won new customers, and only 13 percent cited winning new customers as a primary motivation for adding cloud services.
Shridar Subramamian, vice president of global products for StorageCraft, says the most widely employed cloud service, surprisingly, is not data protection.
“IT organizations only want to have about 30 to 60 days of data available on-premises,” says Subramamian. “The rest of their data can be backed up into the cloud.”
The primary goal is to minimize the access costs that cloud service providers charge customers every time data moves in and out of a cloud, notes Subramamian.
Subramamian says there’s also a lot more interest in disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) because the cost of employing idle virtual machines to keep instances of applications available on standby has dropped considerably.
Of course, there’s nothing especially new about data protection as a cloud service. Public clouds themselves are more than ten years old. But a tipping point in terms of using the cloud to protect data is being reached. The challenge facing solution providers is not so much figuring out whether they need to provide cloud services, but rather how best to go about it.
Be First to Comment