The Other SaaS: Online Backup Comes Of Age

Storage as a service has come a long way from the heyday of the first dot-com bubble and the original managed storage service providers, who invested millions of dollars in building storage infrastructures in the misplaced hope that enterprise customers were ready to trust the storage of their data to what was then an unproven model.

Today's online storage services provider is instead likely to be a small business solution provider who has invested only a couple of thousand dollars, if that much, in integrating the storage service technology from a variety of channel-friendly vendors into its own hardware and/or services offerings.

It could very well be someone like IS Support, a Houston-based managed services provider whose typical customer is a company with between 10 and 30 employees.

Steve Combs, president of IS Support, said his clients have been quickly adopting online data protection since his company signed up with eFolder, an Atlanta-based software provider, to allow small business solution providers to offer online storage to customers. While online data protection is still a small part of his company's revenue, it is a big part of its ability to develop deep business ties with clients, Combs said. "It's one more service we provide our clients where we can get our name in front of them," he said. "It's one more value in front of us."

Once a small business finds it can do things like protect the data for their applications like QuickBooks in a secure off-site location for about $3 per month, they begin asking IS Support about bringing in the service, Combs said.

"Until recently, small businesses didn't understand the value of a backup, let alone disaster recovery," he said. "Now a lot of them are coming to us and asking for options for backing up data."

Building The Business

Online data backup and recovery have helped Guardian Angel Computer Services build a data protection business catering to financial and medical companies, many of whom are classified as small businesses with maybe 10 employees, despite their having annual revenue of $100 million or more, said Laura Steward, CEO of the Norwalk, Conn.-based solution provider.

For those clients, online protection of their data is becoming a must-have, as government compliance regulations are forcing them to not only back up their data but also adhere to rules related to how and when data can be deleted, Steward said.

"They need to be compliant," she said. "It's one thing to purge the data, but another thing to know when to purge. We act as our customers' IT person. No IT people have been called in by the government yet because of compliance issues, but it could happen. We are our clients' virtual CIOs."

Next: Guardian Angel's storage options