Build a Future-Ready Backup Business Without Vendor Lock-in

For managed service providers (MSPs), the way you design cloud backup services determines not only your clients’ resilience to cyber incidents, but also your ability to innovate, differentiate, and grow margins. In a market squeezed by escalating threats and shrinking profitability, hidden costs and vendor restrictions can be the difference between leading the pack or falling behind. 

How you store your data may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about innovation or competitiveness, but it’s actually a fundamental component of your future-proofing strategy. Data storage and backup play a crucial role, for example, in minimizing the business impact of a ransomware attack, system outages, corrupted data, or IT errors. Having the right data immediately available whenever you need it also significantly shapes your budget flexibility and your capacity to deliver new features and services that set you apart.     

Consistently balancing cyber resilience, cost control, and innovation throughout the months and years ahead requires an open, hybrid cloud backup strategy, according to a 2025 whitepaper from Data Protection Matters. A hybrid strategy entails building a distributed cloud foundation that delivers data backup redundancy, protection, and interoperability between cloud providers. This setup also gives you the flexibility to mix and match multi-provider service and feature offerings for further business future-proofing. 

Technology and economic considerations 

The technology decisions that go into a successful data storage and cloud backup strategy dovetail closely with the economic ones. On the technology side, a “provider-neutral” open ecosystem reduces your risk of data loss or inaccessibility when you store backups in diverse locations. This minimizes the impact of any single incident because your data is never dependent on any one provider or a single point of failure.  

An open cloud ecosystem also allows you to cherry-pick best-of-breed offerings to meet individual customer needs, so you can sidestep vendor lock-in with traditional hyperscale providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Lock-in by way of egress fees has long been a natural byproduct of these widely used cloud-native platforms. 

What’s new, and potentially even more limiting, is the rise of “single-stack” backup platforms that bundle software, storage, and secondary vaults into one closed environment. While they may appear convenient, these models keep your data confined within their own ecosystem, making it difficult or impossible to move to another storage provider, cloud, or infrastructure without costly re-architecture. As has historically happened in IT cycles, such restrictions eventually become innovation inhibitors. By limiting yourself to a single provider’s tightly coupled services, you restrict the options and features you can offer customers. 

On the economics side, hyperscale providers are notorious for squeezing MSP margins with hidden fees. Capabilities like immutability, replication, or object sizing come with extra charges that add up quickly. Those costs often discourage complete data protection and regular recovery testing, leaving gaps in both security and compliance. The good news is that you’re not stuck with exclusively using these services and pricing models. 

Transitioning beyond hyperscale storage 

You and your customers probably have plenty of data residing in primary cloud storage services from the likes of AWS, Microsoft, and Google because they were the first to market with scalable cloud storage. To handle skyrocketing data volumes, these providers built out complex storage tiers (hot, cool, cold), each with its own rules, fees, and limitations. Over time, with that tiering has come a minefield of hidden costs, operational complexity, and vendor lock-in that now holds MSPs back. 

For example, the more data you replicate, protect with immutable backups, and test for recovery times and recovery points using hyperscale services, the greater the additional fees you incur. These companies often charge “by the drink” for data ingress, egress, API calls, and storage, which are hard to predict and nearly impossible to budget for. From a cybersecurity perspective, the significant egress fees associated with testing disaster recovery plans can become an economic deterrent to consistently conducting the regular data and business recoverability tests necessary to meet your business continuity goals. When you’re embroiled in managing and minimizing cloud fees, it becomes expensive and complex to adequately protect you and your customers’ data. 

Adopting an open ecosystem, by contrast, enables you to extend your data storage from these hyperscale services to other clouds, such as Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage (more on that in a minute) through the benefit of key industry interoperability partnerships. As a result, you can take advantage of the pricing models that best meet your budget and billing simplicity requirements. You can also gain quicker (instant!) access to data when in recovery mode and diversify your all-important data backups across cloud infrastructures for greater data redundancy and protection. As noted earlier, hybrid cloud storage and backups reduce the risk of data loss or inaccessibility caused by an incident in any one cloud infrastructure. 

Why storage matters, and where Wasabi fits in  

For a future-proof cloud backup strategy, your hybrid cloud storage and backup services should be integrated. Integration of storage with leading backup platforms, whether deployed in the cloud, on-premises, or at the MSP location, delivers comprehensive data protection and fast recoverability from incidents like cyber breaches, outages, or accidental data loss.  

Fast access and recoverability are a function of Wasabi’s industry-leading price and performance, integrated with diverse backup services from key partners such as Veeam, Commvault, Cohesity, Rubrik, and HYCU. All data is accessible as primary data, meaning you avoid the delays in retrieving data from “colder” storage (for a lower price but not a lower total cost of ownership) that are typically the case with closed systems. Wasabi offers hot storage comparable in performance to AWS S3 Standard but at a lower cost and with no fees for access, API calls, or egress. Because Wasabi doesn’t tie you to any one backup application, it’s seamless for you to plug into any backup service of your choice.  

While Wasabi is fully compatible with AWS S3, it costs up to 80% less per terabyte. That’s the fee you pay; there are no hidden surcharges for accessing, uploading, and recovering your own data. Because Wasabi knows that data resilience is only as strong as your ability to regularly test your recovery times, there are no fees associated with testing or data recovery. The pricing model is designed to be predictable so you can test your backups and disaster recovery plans as often as needed without incurring additional costs. And lower costs mean greater margins. 

You also get cutting-edge features to further protect your priceless data from tampering, theft, and loss. Immutability, for example, allows you to prohibit data changes for a specified period of time. Integrated cloud backup services with the partners mentioned create essential, secure snapshots for recovery from incidents like cyberattacks, hardware failures, or accidental data loss.  

Protect your data relentlessly 

Data has become king. Your approach to cloud backup not only informs a critical part of your business continuity and resilience strategy. It also drives your ability to mix and match services and features from different cloud providers for innovative and/or custom value-added offerings, which directly impacts your competitiveness going forward. 

An open, hybrid cloud backup foundation affords the greatest potential for future-proofing your data security foundation and avoiding lock-in. You can now take advantage of the hybrid cloud environment, thanks to a growing ecosystem of interoperable cloud partners and standards. The open ecosystem allows you and your customers to extend their IT environments seamlessly across cloud borders, supplementing the hyperscale services in use with those from smaller cloud innovators. It also opens up new business opportunities by delivering greater freedom to choose among providers, services, features, and pricing to best meet your customers’ needs.