Beyond Backup for MSPs (Part 2): A Go-to-Market Guide for Cyber Resilience

In Part 1 of this series, we made the case for MSPs to move beyond basic backup as a service and into cyber resilience, expanding the promise from simply protecting data to keeping the business running through disruption.

We continue the conversation with an exploration of what happens next: taking the cyber resilience practice to market. We’ll focus on what’s keeping your customers up at night, how to frame resilience in terms they care about, and how to turn your cyber resilience offering into a service you can reliably sell, renew, and grow.

Understanding your customers

For most MSPs building a cyber resilience practice, the sweet spot is the same mid-sized organization you met in Part 1: enterprise-level complexity, but limited staff and budgets. What keeps them up at night isn't just a list of industry buzzwords. It’s questions like:

• What happens to revenue if our core systems are down for a day?

• What if an audit finds we can’t actually recover what we say we can?

• What does one bad incident do to our reputation with customers, patients, or students?

On the ground, that anxiety shows up as data and system sprawl. Most mid-sized companies are running patchwork environments: a mix of on-premises servers, cloud workloads, SaaS applications, departmental one-offs, and outsourced IT functions. Critical data ends up scattered across all of it, which makes even small incidents harder to contain. IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report found that breaches involving data spread across multiple environments are among the most expensive and time-consuming to handle.

You’ll see this pattern most clearly in financial services, healthcare, and education, and in any organization managing sensitive data across on-prem and cloud systems. IBM’s data shows these sectors consistently face some of the highest breach costs and longest recovery timelines.

How to tell your cyber resilience story

Once you’ve defined your cyber resilience offer, the next challenge is making sure that every stakeholder sees themselves in the story you’re telling.

Boards and executives are under pressure to prove they can withstand an incident, not just prevent one. Regulators and insurers want evidence of tested recovery plans, not just a list of tools. Operations teams need confidence that critical services can be restored quickly, and finance leaders are looking for predictability instead of surprise recovery costs.

That’s where a structured resilience conversation helps. You can approach it in three parts:

1. Start with what matters most. Ground the discussion in their world: which systems matter most, when downtime really hurts, and what a “bad day” looks like in terms of revenue, trust, and operations. This quickly surfaces gaps like unowned apps, untested recovery steps, or fuzzy responsibilities.

2. Walk through a simple resilience model. Demonstrate in clear language how you reduce the impact of an incident, where clean immutable copies live and how you keep them isolated, and how you bring services back online in a defined order with clear roles and regular testing. Mapping their current environment to that model makes it easier to show where your service adds value.

3. Land on outcomes, not ingredients. Close by tying your offer to what changes for them: less business risk, faster recovery, fewer surprises in audits and budgets. IT and security teams will focus on how it works; finance, legal, and business leaders will focus on what it lets them do with more confidence.

What customer pushback is really telling you

When you start talking about cyber resilience, you’re going to hear some familiar pushback. That doesn’t mean the conversation is failing; it’s usually a signal about where your customer is feeling the most pressure: budget, risk, complexity, or internal perception.

Instead of treating those moments as objections to overcome, you can treat them as diagnostics. The way they respond tells you what they’re worried about and where your CRaaS story needs to go deeper.

Here are a few of the most common reactions:

• “We already have backup.” Often, that means backup is treated as a checkbox. There’s little regular testing, no clear restore priorities, and no shared picture of what recovery looks like. This is your opening to move beyond copies and show how your testing, runbooks, and recovery commitments get them back online in a controlled way.

• “Our leadership won’t pay for this.” Resilience can sound like a nice-to-have on top of existing tools and services. The real issue is that downtime, failed audits, and emergency recoveries haven’t been translated into business impact. CRaaS is a way to swap unplanned recovery projects for a predictable service line, something finance can budget for and insurers recognize.

• “We’re too small / not regulated enough for that level of resilience.” Many mid-sized organizations still see resilience as an enterprise-only concern. But hybrid environments, SaaS reliance, and customer data obligations put them firmly in the blast radius when something breaks. CRaaS lets you right-size resilience, starting with the systems that matter most and expanding from there.

• “We don’t want to add more tools to manage.” This usually points to tool fatigue, not resistance to resilience itself. It’s a chance to position your offer as simplification: standard patterns for backup and immutable storage, tested runbooks, fewer one-off recovery fire drills, and less vendor sprawl.

When you treat objections as clues, not dead ends, they become a roadmap for how to deepen the resilience conversation and move the deal forward.

Building your resilience foundation with Wasabi

You’ve now got the vision, the story, and the shape of a cyber resilience practice. The most important piece is making sure the platform behind it can deliver what you’ve promised, especially when it’s time to recover.

Every assurance of resilience comes down to whether you can recover your customers’ clean data quickly without compromising your margins. That starts with storage that’s built for more than just capacity. Wasabi gives you exactly that:

• Cyber-resilient by design: Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage gives you immutable object storage and multi-user approvals for sensitive operations, so accidental or malicious deletions don’t wipe out your last good copy. Our newest built-in feature, Covert Copy, allows you to maintain a hidden, immutable “shadow” copy of your most critical data, kept out of sight from attackers but ready to restore from if primary backups are ever compromised.

• No-fee recoverability: Retrieve data and run recovery tests as often as you need with no charges for access, API calls, or egress. That makes it realistic to schedule regular DR drills, validate customer runbooks, and rehearse incident scenarios without worrying that every test will eat into your margins or force a budget conversation.

• Built for MSP stacks: Wasabi’s broad S3-compatibility and integrations with leading technology providers let you plug Hot Cloud Storage into your existing offerings. You can standardize on a single storage layer across customers and tools, simplify operations for your team, and roll out new CRaaS tiers without redesigning your stack every time.

The result is a storage layer you can trust on your worst day: tough enough to protect customer data, simple enough for your team to run at scale, and predictable enough that your CRaaS tiers stay profitable as you grow.

Resources to launch and grow your resilience practice

Once you’ve committed to building a cyber resilience practice, the next step is turning it into something repeatable, differentiated, and profitable. That takes more than a storage platform; it takes an ecosystem you can plug into.

Wasabi’s partner resources are designed to help you do that:

• Technology Alliance Partners: Get access to a broad ecosystem of verified cloud application partners that already work with Wasabi, so you can build the solutions you need without starting from scratch.

• Training and documentation: Wasabi Academy and our webinar hub give your team the product grounding they need, with feature descriptions, getting-started guides, configuration how-tos, and integration docs for Wasabi solutions.

• Sales and marketing support: The Wasabi Partner Portal centralizes onboarding, training, and customer-ready sales and marketing assets so you’re not rebuilding every deck or leave-behind.

The bottom line

Cyber resilience is ultimately about trust: your customers trust you to be there on their worst day, and you trust your platform to perform when it’s under pressure.

Wasabi is built to support that relationship so you can focus on designing and delivering the CRaaS practice that fits your business and your customers. As you build and refine your offering, we’ll be here to help you keep that promise.