StorageCraft To MSPs: Make Disaster Recovery Top Priority Before Disasters Happen

Managed service providers looking to boost their business may find data protection the easiest path to future growth.

That's the word from Mark Baird, sales director of the Western territory for Draper, Utah-based StorageCraft, who told MSPs attending the NexGen 2018 Conference and Expo that it is time they bring disaster recovery and data protection to the top of the list of customer priorities.

Businesses tend to put disaster recovery planning at the bottom of the list of things to do, but fires, floods, and the "oops factor" eventually cause a lot them to go out of business, Baird said.

[Related: StorageCraft Converges Primary, Backup, DR Storage For Midrange With OneXafe]

"If you are the MSP, they rely on you to keep them in business," he said.

Customers are concerned with the fact that the amount of data they must manage is likely doubling every two years, leading to an increase in the need to secure that data to mitigate the rising cost of losing access to it, Baird said.

StorageCraft has been helping customers protect data, both under the StorageCraft brand and as the technology behind the data protection offerings of several other well-known brands, he said. "Eighty percent of that space out there has been us," he said.

Now, however, StorageCraft wants to own the market with its own brand of data protection technology, based on its ShadowProtect software technology and on storage hardware technology the company got in early 2017 with its acquisition of Exablox, Baird said.

For that reason, the company earlier this year introduced a new data protection suite that includes ShadowXafe, a software product that backs up data from any physical or virtual or cloud device to any storage device or cloud, and OneXafe, a hardware-based data protection appliance with scale-out and scale-up capabilities.

Also part of the suite is StorageCraft Cloud Services, a cloud-based disaster recovery offering featuring the company's own cloud. Baird said StorageCraft Cloud Services allows customers and their solution providers set policies for disaster recovery to get full backups and restores in the event of a disaster such as a hurricane.

StorageCraft will also in the near future introduce EdgeXafe, a hardware-based backup and disaster recovery appliance for smaller customers with one to three servers, Baird said.

StorageCraft has an offering worth taking a second look at, said Harold Welch, vice president of worldwide technical solutions at Novarad, an American Fork, Utah-based MSP.

"We are looking to propose a hybrid disaster recovery solution to clients with both an on-premises and web-based components," he said. "Knowing that when a disaster may be coming up that a customer can get proactively failed over is a great idea. And StorageCraft demonstrated it can play in this space."