StorageCraft Cloud Services Give MSPs Options

StorageCraft Technology Corp. announced enhancements to its DR as a Service (DRaaS) Cloud Services for MSPs.

DRaaS for MSPs now includes Cloud Pooling, One-Click Orchestrated Recovery, and 30-Day Free Virtualized Infrastructure Replication.

For MSPs, this offers additional revenue opportunities, improved margins and expanded market potential. Purpose-built for DR and total BC, StorageCraft Cloud Services reside in tier 3 datacenters providing enterprise-grade security and 99.999% uptime.

Cloud Pooling: Until now, MSPs could not pool storage across machines within StorageCraft Cloud Services. Now, StorageCraft Cloud Services pools each machine’s included data capacity at each service level, giving MSPs improved efficiency and flexibility. Because MSPs can plan and load-balance their total data capacity, it avoids the costs of unplanned overages. It also lets MSPs sell their service offerings to a broader market. For example, an MSP may be able to add small businesses that might not previously have been a profitable option to service at competitive price points.

One-Click Orchestrated Recovery: Through a single pane of glass, using the StorageCraft Cloud Services web portal, MSPs can pre-configure each customer’s recovery sequence so that, in the event of disaster or on-premises failure, entire systems can be brought back online with a single click to the last recovery point. Recovery can be pre-configured to ensure the right servers, directories and files come back online at the right time.

StorageCraft Cloud Services for MSPs provides default settings of 3 daily and 2 weekly recovery points, plus the option to add more. This high-value, low-touch feature helps MSPs bring customers back online within minutes of a disaster rather than hours or days and can help an MSP meet RPOs and SLAs. In case of a ransomware attack, One-Click Orchestrated Recovery can help an MSP circumvent the attack by re-booting to the last point of recovery from the cloud, so a business can continue unaffected, without paying ransom and without losing data or customers.

30-Day Free Virtualization: StorageCraft Cloud Services can accelerate data recovery across virtual, physical and cloud infrastructures, restore server environments at scale, and restore an entire infrastructure. In the event of a sitewide disaster, it offers the ability for an MSP to simply virtualize a customers’ IT environment into the StorageCraft Cloud and operate as though they were working off their own system. Customers experience BC while their on-premises infrastructure is brought back online.

The 30-Day Free Virtualization per machine benefit ensures BC for costumers at unmatched economics compared to alternative offerings and public cloud services that charge for every second their service is used in case of a disaster. It also provides MSPs a low-cost, high-value functionality to run DR testing scenarios of customer environments. Pre-testing is a critical, and often overlooked component of success DR planning.

Says Clay Harris, president and COO, WorkSmart, a StorageCraft MSP: “The business opportunity from offering Cloud Services is immense. It is one of the fastest-growing segments in our industry, with DR as a Service set to grow from $2.4 billion in to $3.73 billion by 2021 (1). Choosing the right vendor is critical to make the most of this potential. We partnered with StorageCraft because its Cloud Services give us the means to differentiate in the market, offer more to our existing customers and attract new customers. As well as the increased revenue opportunities, the ease and low-maintenance of StorageCraft’s Cloud Services allows us to improve margins through reduced operational cost and overhead.”

Adds Hugo Parra, senior director of product management, StorageCraft: “StorageCraft Cloud Services has been hugely successful since becoming available in 2014. The number of servers protected by StorageCraft Cloud Services increased by almost 300% Y/Y in 2017. Our MSP community is reaping the benefits of purpose-built BC cloud services. They are able to offer a superior alternative to public cloud in terms of self-serve failover orchestration, all-inclusive virtualization and recovery costs, and clear, predictable SLAs. This high-value low-touch model boosts partners’ margins, addressable market, and ability to meet customers’ most stringent requirements while keeping maintenance and operation costs to a minimum.“

(1) Source: Gartner: 2018 Magic Quadrant for DR as a Service, July 2018, Mark Jaggers and Ron Blair