MSPs: What Are You Missing from Your Portfolio?

If you’re like many MSPs, keeping on top of the latest tech trends is one of your biggest concerns. Your job is to be the IT expert. Your clients count on you to provide solutions that help them improve productivity, enhance security, and get more value from their technology investments. More sophisticated MSPs know that the secret isn’t adding new solutions to their tech stack—it’s about adding the right solutions. As you no doubt realize, the right solutions should provide value to clients, but they should also be scalable and super simple for your team to manage from anywhere. Add in a healthy margin and you have a solution grand slam. With these essentials in mind, here are a few profitable solutions many MSPs are adding to their portfolios.

Home Office Data Protection

In the wake of COVID-19, many businesses have been forced to re-think their work-from-home policies. Companies like Google even plan to keep employees working remotely until summer of 2021. And, while approaches differ from company to company, the fact is that remote work is more important now than ever. Even when COVID-19 is behind us, employees will likely continue to demand the flexibility they get from generous remote work policies. This move to remote work is a massive opportunity for MSPs. Here are just a few offerings you can provide to help businesses keep data secure, even if it’s scattered across hundreds of remote locations. Remember, you can always bundle these services together into one “remote worker” promotion or product to give clients more value for less cost.

• Secure VPNs Keep data secure between systems with a secure pathway via VPN
• Secure storage devices Provide end-users with encrypted drives so that data is secure, even if it’s lost or stolen in transit
• Secure video conferencing Find, implement, and support video conferencing solutions that are actually secure (many of them aren’t)
• Remote backups It’s easy to skip backups for individual employees and it’s not always easy to back up machines remotely. 
• Office 365 and G Suite backups Even if end-users store most of their data in the cloud you should still take backups, just in case. Use StorageCraft Cloud Backup to back up and recover data generated in SaaS applications.

Remote Office and Branch Office (ROBO) Data Protection

Since branch locations rarely have IT staff and traveling to them is time consuming for you, you need a way to back up data without actually going onsite. This is the perfect situation for an appliance-based backup solution like StorageCraft® OneXafe® Solo. Solo is so easy to deploy that anyone at a branch location can set it up. They simply plug it and connect it to the internet. Meanwhile, you manage backup policies remotely via a cloud-based management platform called StorageCraft OneSystem. That makes it super easy to protect data at branch locations, even if there’s no onsite expert to help.

Virtualized / Scale-Out Storage

Many businesses are transitioning to scale-out storage because it’s an easy, cost-effective way to manage data storage. In a world where data continues to grow at an incredible rate, this strategy can be invaluable for your clients. Rather than dealing with complex data silos and the heavy costs associated with upgrading storage infrastructures, scale-out storage makes it simple. Because all storage devices are treated as one data pool that’s centrally managed from one pane of glass, a scale-out approach reduces management complexity. When your client needs more storage, it's simple to add more into the pool. This helps them manage costs because they can just add the storage their business really needs. For midsized businesses, StorageCraft OneXafe is a great option for converged scale-out storage.

Disaster Recovery as a Service

Some MSPs miss out on some serious profit because they think about backups and data protection narrowly. For most, the conversation with clients is still about the importance of backups, but not about the costs of downtime. Rather than sell the importance of keeping data copies, focus on disaster recovery as a service. Explain that in a sense, it’s a form of insurance. While backups are great for some data protection businesses are still vulnerable to costly downtime, which according to Gartner costs as an average of $5,600 per minute. Rather than just protecting endpoints, think about how to provide a comprehensive disaster recovery strategy so that your clients don’t just have backups, they have a fast way to recover, too.

Conclusion

There are lots of exciting ways to expand your portfolio if you know where to look. The IT world is constantly evolving, which means you’ll always have opportunities to provide new, valuable services to your clients. If you’re interested in turning data protection into your most profitable revenue stream, consider how StorageCraft can help. With solutions ranging from backup and disaster recovery to sophisticated scale-out storage, there are dozens of ways MSPs can create profitable, custom solutions for their clients. Check out this page to see why so many MSPs are becoming StorageCraft partners.