How MSPs Choose the Best Cloud Backup Solution

Introduction 

Being a managed service provider (MSP) or cloud service provider (CSP) is about more than just providing IT services for clients. Yes, you manage a tech stack for your customers, but you also take responsibility for some of their most valuable assets and critical business systems. It’s a big job, with a lot of opportunities to create value, but one that also comes with high risk of exposure.  

How can you best protect your clients’ data assets, especially if they are in multi-tenant cloud environments? As the steward of your clients’ data, you have a duty to ensure business continuity in the event of an outage or cyberattack, such as a ransomware attack.  

This duty hinges upon effective, scalable, and offsite backup and restore functions, making cloud backup for MSPs essential for doing business.  This article looks at the role that cloud backups can play for MSPs as they strive to deliver business continuity and operational resilience. It reviews how cloud backup can be tailored for MSPs, as well as what you should look for in a storage solution.  

Understanding cloud backup solutions for MSPs 

An MSP cloud backup involves more than an MSP simply copying client files to cloud storage. Cloud backup is a systematic, multi-stage process that safely backs up copies of data onto cloud platforms. The process engages some sort of dedicated backup and restore solution that leverages the cloud architecture as its storage destination. The destination could be a public cloud provider like Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud storage service like Wasabi, or a private cloud.  

The importance of cloud backup in modern business 

Cloud backup is not the only way to back up data, but it has great appeal to modern businesses and MSPs alike. The cloud offers a degree of scalability, speed of deployment, and flexibility that is difficult, if not impossible, for traditional backup systems to match. In contrast to on-premises backup solutions, which require the procurement and setup of storage hardware—an expensive, time-consuming process—the cloud offers instantaneous provisioning of limitless storage capacity on demand.  

The cloud also has significant geographic advantages over on-premises alternatives. While it’s possible to set up a backup site in another location, with the cloud you can spin up storage instances in multiple geographies whenever you want with no lead time.  

Economically, cloud backup enables you to set up scalable backup without capital expenditure (CapEx). This is useful for an enterprise but foundational for an MSP. As an MSP, you must accommodate unpredictable, highly scalable backup workloads, especially as your clientele expands. The cloud makes it possible to arrange backup for all clients without investing capital in physical infrastructure.  

MSPs must protect client data from loss, malicious modification, or unavailability by implementing policies and practices for business resilience and disaster recovery (DR). Cloud backup is the best way to realize this objective. It’s the only technology that provides the depth of capacity and agility that effective DR and resilience require. 

Evaluating your MSP’s needs for cloud backup 

Figuring out your optimal cloud backup as a service requires a careful, deliberative process. While there’s this general idea of “the cloud,” cloud computing solutions are quite heterogeneous and adaptable to customer needs. Service levels and costs also vary across providers. As an MSP, you are the customer, but you are also representing your customers' needs. Getting it right will require some thinking and planning. 

Assessing data volume and scalability requirements 

The first step in planning a cloud backup solution offering is determining how much data you manage for your clients. This will be relevant to arriving at the optimal mix of cloud storage tiers you need. Data is not monolithic. For example, you will deal with databases, file folders, and unstructured data like email messages and rich media.   

Each data type will require a distinct approach to backup and recovery. Not every type of data requires the same frequency of backup and speed of restoration in the event of an outage. Lower-priority data is a good candidate for backup on lower-cost, slower tiers.  

Unstructured data is the most common data type. It’s also experiencing the highest rate of growth. This should make sense because media files and documents proliferate at a faster rate than structured data of the kind found in databases.  

Furthermore, given that data volumes are not static, you must also map out scalability requirements. If you’re backing up 10 terabytes for a client this year, next year it might be 15. You can store all the data you want in the cloud, so long as your customer is willing to pay for it. Keep in mind what your clients’ backup budget will look like in the coming years. It’s best to think through the anticipated data volumes and budget for cloud backup accordingly.  

Identifying critical data and applications for backup 

The best practice in cloud backup is to identify the most critical data and applications for backup and focus on them first—with the highest level of backup depth and performance. This is the essence of cyber resilience. Understand that backup is about more than protecting data, it’s about protecting the business itself. Without certain data and applications, most businesses cannot function. The business can fall apart or suffer serious reputational damage if a cyberattack or outage is severe enough and restoration functions are too slow.  

Typically, the most critical data gets the most thorough backup and fastest restoration. MSP clients, for example, usually expect an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and its data to have a very fast recovery time objective (RTO). In contrast, a file drive holding last year’s PowerPoints probably doesn’t merit the same service level. This kind of tiering of backup was due to cost, with more frequent backups and faster restores being more expensive. However, this is starting to change with cloud storage offerings like those from Wasabi, which offers a single high-performing tier of cloud storage. 

Configuring a cyber resilience solution and cloud backup solution, therefore, should proceed from the question, “What data and applications can this organization not live without?” The answer may be ERP, manufacturing management, logistics, etc. Whatever they might be, those applications should be set up with fast RTOs to be restored to operation as quickly as possible. They also need the most up-to-date possible recovery point objectives (RPOs), which establish how recently the backup has occurred, e.g., being able to restore all transactions up to within 10 seconds of the outage. The whole application, not just the data, needs backing up for rapid restoration. 

Along the way, don’t forget about Microsoft 365. The service is home to much of an organization’s unstructured data. While Microsoft does provide a basic backup of 365 data, the default 14-day data retention may not be optimal. You will likely want to include a more robust Microsoft 365 protection strategy in your cloud backup offering. 

Key features to look for in a cloud backup solution 

While looking for the right cloud backup solution for your clients, make sure the provider hits all the marks in terms of security, compliance, and privacy.  

In particular, you should look for a cloud backup solution with robust account management tools. Does it offer any administrative efficiency options, crucial for managing large amounts of data and multiple clients at once? These features will be important in the success of your business’ cloud backup service.  

Client management and reseller features 

The right cloud backup solution for an MSP will be one that supports cloud reselling and other client management features. As an MSP, you’re an intermediary between your customer and the cloud provider. The easier it is to manage that intermediary role, the better your business will run and the faster you can scale your service. For instance, does the solution have sub-account setup and tracking features that enable you to set up and monitor backup separately for each customer? And, does it have reporting and charge details that facilitate client billing?  

Automation and ease of use 

If you’re like most MSPs, your team will be managing backup and restore for multiple clients. The more productive you can make your people, the more profitable your business will be. You’ll also be able to provide better customer support because staff can focus more quickly on client needs. Automation and ease of use enable you to realize these objectives. Examples of automation include automatic application of backup policy to multiple data sets, and automated backup and restore testing. The best cloud backup solution for an MSP will, therefore, be one that provides the highest levels of automation and the greatest ease of use.  

Security and compliance standards 

Being the steward of your clients’ data means protecting it from malicious actors and keeping compliant with all necessary industry and governmental regulations. For instance, if your client is bound by data sovereignty laws prohibiting them from storing consumers’ data in foreign countries, you must ensure their data is stored within its country of origin. For these reasons, the right cloud backup solution will come with robust cloud security features and the ability to define and enforce policies that facilitate regulatory compliance. 

Ransomware risk mitigation is one of the most urgently needed capabilities for today’s MSPs. Ransomware attackers, who encrypt your clients’ data until they receive a ransom, have become ubiquitous and highly sophisticated. They often target backed-up data sets, knowing that a successful backup will release the target from having to pay the ransom. Immutable backups are great countermeasures. By using cryptography to establish immutable storage—which cannot be modified or deleted—the MSP can block ransomware attacks that target backups. 

Recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO) 

Cloud backup and recovery have to meet your clients’ expectations in terms of RTOs and RPOs. This might even be a contractual obligation, e.g., you guarantee to back up a given system and its data within one hour of an outage, and so forth. A good cloud backup solution for an MSP will allow you to set up RTOs and RPOs that match your client service level agreements. 

Comparing cloud backup solutions: what to consider 

You have choices when it comes to cloud backup solutions. One factor to consider when choosing the right solution for your MSP business is what cloud object storage to choose as your backup destination.. Cost efficiency, return on investment (ROI), and integration with existing infrastructure are also worth assessing when selecting a cloud backup solution. 

Cost-efficiency and ROI 

Providing cloud backup service to your clients needs to be profitable, ideally quite profitable. However, earning money from the service is about more than just marking up your cost and charging it to your client at a profit. It’s better to make a financial calculus that looks at the costs of adopting the solution, training your team to use it, and staffing for roles that support the service. Only with those figures will you get an accurate return on investment (ROI). It may turn out that cloud services that have lower cloud storage pricing actually drive lower ROI due to complexity, inefficient admin, and the like.  

No one expects cloud backup to be inexpensive. Most MSP clients understand that a high-quality service is worth paying for. What MSP clients don’t like are unexpected costs. Some cloud backup providers charge for data egress, such as when you restore a backed-up volume. If egress charges are based on data volume, they will be variable, a situation that will likely lead to client confusion, complexity, and frustration. Try to select a cloud storage provider that does not charge additional fees for data egress and access like Wasabi to keep costs simple and transparent for your clients. 

Integration with existing infrastructure 

A cloud backup solution does not exist in isolation. It’s part of a broader IT estate and cloud ecosystem. It is optimal, therefore, if the solution integrates with existing infrastructure. For example, AWS S3 is the de facto standard for cloud storage. A cloud backup solution should integrate easily with S3. If it doesn’t, and it requires a custom integration for this purpose, that will be a drag on implementation and profitability.  

Conclusion 

Cloud backup is the optimal choice for MSPs that serve as stewards of their clients’ data and applications. The technology provides an agile, endlessly scalable way to protect digital assets. It does this without requiring CapEx. That said, not every cloud backup service is equally well suited to an MSP’s needs. Factors like ease of use, efficiency of administration, and the predictability of cost are all important for MSPs who want to choose a decision that will work best for their businesses.