MSPs: How Offering Cyber Recovery as a Service Can Win Customers and Drive New Revenues

The security arms race is in full swing. And every advance in prevention technologies is met with a new arsenal of weapons and tactics being employed by cybercriminals. Because the stakes keep growing, every organization needs to raise its game and implement better ways to protect itself against attacks. 

How high are the stakes? Cybersecurity Ventures predicts cybercrime will cost $10.5 trillion annually by 2025, up from $3 trillion in 2015. That’s a considerable number, and it means organizations must put new strategies—both defensive measures and recovery methods—in place to protect their sensitive data and critical systems against attack.

CRaaS Delivers Data Resiliency

One of the most promising new strategies for addressing these challenges is cyber recovery as a service (CRaaS). CRaaS lets businesses recover data and restore systems quickly after a cyberattack. And CRaaS is explicitly designed to repair the damage caused by a cyberattack. That sets CRaaS apart from traditional disaster recovery tools built primarily for floods, fires, and hardware failures. 

CRaaS creates a secure and isolated environment where an organization can quickly restore its critical data and systems if a breach occurs. That’s a significant change from typical cyberattack responses, where, if an organization’s data is compromised, panic is what usually quickly sets in. 

A Crash Course in CRaaS

As noted above, traditional disaster recovery solutions work great for physical server failures or for cleaning up after a natural disaster like a fire or flood. CRaaS stands out because it delivers a more modern, comprehensive recovery, enabling businesses to restore their data immediately after an attack while fixing the security gaps that allowed the attack to happen in the first place.

But for MSPs, offering CRaaS and delivering it are two different things. Even MSPs specializing in disaster recovery may not have the resources and expertise in IT security and forensics that providing an effective CRaaS solution demands. That’s because recovering data after a cyberattack is just the beginning. MSPs must also be able to implement new security policies and solutions to prevent future attacks and keep their clients' data safe.

Because CRaaS can be lucrative, many MSPs consider adding it to their offerings. But a robust CRaaS solution requires the correct skill sets and technologies to meet customer service level agreements (SLAs). CRaaS also forces MSPs to stay current with the latest cybersecurity threats and provide the most effective solutions to stop them.

CRaaS-competent MSPs ensure that their clients' systems are secure, resilient, and protected against today’s and tomorrow’s cyberattacks. CRaaS is an ever-evolving field, and smart MSPs recognize this. They also recognize that ongoing collaboration with their technology vendors is essential.

No one solution can completely solve the problem. It takes many tools and techniques to protect your customers, get them back on their feet as soon as possible, and defend them against future threats. Leading MSPs have the tools and the ability to get customers up and running fast after a cyber incident. They also find security gaps, fix them, and implement measures to prevent incidents in the future.

CRaaS-competent MSPs also stand out because they understand how to work with cyber insurance companies and, if worse comes to worst, how to negotiate with cybercriminals in the event of a successful ransomware attack. Negotiating with the attackers may sometimes be the only way out. That requires a fine-tuned skillset and detailed knowledge base that MSPs need to keep updated.

CRaaS Can Be an Essential MSP Offering

The benefits of CRaaS for both MSPs and their customers are apparent. For the customer, CRaaS assures continuity and, potentially, survival itself. A competent MSP partner can monitor their customers' data and networks around the clock and handle any incident quickly and efficiently. That breeds customer confidence in the service and in the MSP. Most importantly, customers can focus on running their businesses because the MSP does the heavy lifting when drawing up a comprehensive cybersecurity plan.

For MSPs, delivering an effective CRaaS solution differentiates their company from the pack and opens doors to more business and healthier revenue streams. With the exploding threat of cyberattacks, it may soon simply become necessary for MSPs to offer CRaaS to compete in a tight marketplace.

By going the extra mile and offering CRaaS now, MSPs can create tighter relationships with their customers and open new growth opportunities. But it must be done right. You first need the correct skillset and technologies in place. And the service must be comprehensive, quickly restoring data in the event of a cyberattack and continuously delivering the new products and policies needed to take on tomorrow's threats.

Arcserve Enables CRaaS

Arcserve offers the broadest set of best-in-class solutions to manage, protect, and recover all data workloads, from SMB to enterprise, regardless of location or complexity. Arcserve solutions eliminate complexity while bringing best-in-class, cost-effective, agile, and massively scalable data protection, and certainty across all data environments. This includes on-prem, off-prem (including DRaaS, BaaS, and Cloud-to-Cloud SaaS Backup), hyperconverged, and edge infrastructures. 

Learn more about how becoming an Arcserve Technology Partner can support your CRaaS offering initiatives.