Beyond Backup for MSPs (Part 1): Making the Case for a Cyber Resilience Practice

If it feels like every week brings a new “worst breach yet,” you’re not imagining it. Cyberattacks aren’t slowing down, and the business of stopping them is growing just as fast. McKinsey estimates that cybersecurity represents a $1.5 to $2 trillion addressable market, driven by a surge in threats, tighter regulations, and a growing gap between what organizations need and what their current tools can deliver.

The fastest growth is happening with mid-sized organizations who are facing enterprise-grade threats on small-business budgets. More of them are leaning on managed service providers (MSPs) to protect their data, keep them compliant, and get them back online quickly when something goes wrong.

That reliance shows up clearly in the numbers. Cybersecurity managed services accounted for $17.3 billion in 2024 and are expected to reach $41.5 billion by 2032, a clear move away from self-managed security toward trusted providers. That puts MSPs on the hook to make sure cloud workloads, hybrid environments, and an ever-growing set of devices and applications stay secure and recoverable.

But growth also means competition. Industry analysts at Houlihan Lokey found that 97% of high-earning MSPs now offer advanced security services and are looking for ways to stand out in a crowded market. Basic backup and security services are no longer a differentiator; it’s the minimum expectation just to stay in the conversation. The MSPs that win are the ones who can tie what they do to business outcomes, not just tools.

This is an open invitation to move beyond standalone backup, build a true cyber resilience practice, and claim a bigger, more strategic role with your customers.

Cyber resilience defined

Let’s start by getting clear on how cyber resilience fits alongside the security and backup services you already deliver.

• Cybersecurity is everything you put in place to keep systems and data safe in the first place: policies, controls, tools, and monitoring that help keep bad actors out. It’s firewalls, multi-factor authentication, endpoint detection and response, and all the other measures you use to reduce the chance of an incident.

• Backup and disaster recovery are about getting back what was lost. You’re creating copies of critical data and systems and having a way to restore them when something fails, whether that’s a deleted file, a ransomware event, or a full site outage.

• Cyber resilience is what happens when, despite those efforts, something still gets through. It’s how an organization prepares for, responds to, and recovers from attacks or failures so it can keep the business running.

For your customers, that’s a meaningful shift. The conversation moves beyond backup into how long the business can afford to be down, what comes back online first, and how they’ll know the recovery plan will hold up when it’s needed.

(For a deeper dive into how these pieces fit together, check out our Cyber Resilience vs. Cyber Security guide.)

What cyber resilience makes possible

Once customers see how resilience fits alongside security and backup, the next step is showing what it actually changes for their business. This is where partners can really differentiate. Resilience gives you a way to talk about outcomes, not just tools or features. You can help customers understand what they gain when cyber resilience is baked into your offerings:

• Stronger protection: Immutable, air-gapped copies and tighter identity controls deliver safeguards that used to be limited to large enterprises.

• Better visibility and validation: Regular testing, clear reporting, and repeatable recovery workflows give customers confidence that they can bounce back from an incident, not just hope the backup works.

• Support for compliance and continuity: Retention, logging, and evidence of controls make it easier to get through audits and regulatory reviews without last-minute scrambles.

• Cost stability for everyone: Predictable services and cleaner recovery paths cost less than emergency projects and rushed rebuilds, and they’re easier for finance teams to budget and approve.

• Simpler day-to-day operations: Standardized runbooks, clear roles, and consistent testing mean fewer 2 a.m. fire drills and less time reinventing the wheel for every incident.

• Healthier margins and stickier customers: When resilience is packaged into clear tiers and SLAs, you can protect your margins, cut down on emergency work, and make renewals about value delivered.

A defined resilience service also changes your role in the room. You become part of upfront conversations about risk, uptime, and continuity. That gives you more influence over roadmap decisions, better visibility into upcoming projects, and a clearer path to expanding your services over time.

Turning cyber resilience into a service you can sell

Most MSPs are closer to a resilience model than they realize. If you already offer BaaS or DRaaS, you’re partway there.

You’re already securing environments, running backups, and helping customers recover when something breaks. The real shift is turning that work into a clear, named service that customers can see, understand, and budget for.

A good CRaaS offer does a few things differently:

• It has a clear promise. You’re promising a business outcome: defined recovery targets, a tested plan, and evidence that it all works.

• It’s easy to explain. Customers should be able to describe your service to their key decision-makers in a sentence or two: what you protect, how quickly they can expect to be back online, and what kind of reporting they’ll see.

• It’s tiered on impact, not just features. Entry-level might cover core systems and basic testing; higher tiers might add tighter recovery objectives, more frequent validation, and deeper reporting. The point is to align levels with business risk, not just a longer list of tools.

• It’s measurable. You define what “good” looks like (RPOs and RTOs for key systems, testing cadence, response expectations) and build your reporting around those commitments so customers can see progress over time.

Framed this way, cyber resilience stops being extra work around backup and becomes a product in its own right: something you can price, position, and grow.

The CRaaS service model

Underneath the branding, most cyber resilience offers are built from the same core components:

• Defined recovery objectives: You help customers set clear objectives for downtime and data loss and map those to minimal viable assets.

• A resilience-ready architecture: You design and implement the mix of backup, immutable storage, access controls, and networking needed to guarantee a clean place to recover from.

• Documented playbooks: You create step-by-step recovery plans so everyone knows what to do, in what order, when something breaks.

• Regular testing and validation: You schedule and run recovery tests, tune the plan when gaps show up, and report back on readiness.

• Ongoing monitoring and reporting: You provide visibility into backup status, recovery tests, and risk posture in a way business and IT leaders can understand.

Put together, these elements turn the work you’re doing into a clear, named service, something customers can see on a line item, budget for, and explain to their boards.

What comes next

That’s the “what” and “why” behind cyber resilience for MSPs. In Part 2: A Go-to-Market Guide for Cyber Resilience, we’ll focus on the go-to-market side of the equation: who you’re selling to, how to tell a resilience story that lands with non-technical stakeholders, how to handle common pushback, and how to prove your practice works in the real world.