The Other SaaS: Online Backup Comes Of Age

These include EMC, Hopkinton, Mass.; Hewlett-Packard, Palo Alto, Calif.; IBM, Armonk, N.Y.; Seagate Technology, Scotts Valley, Calif.; and Symantec. Among these vendors, EMC and HP have recently introduced offerings that are direct-only for the time being, but which the vendors say will have a channel component in the future, while the others offer a combination of direct and indirect offerings.

Steward of Guardian Angel, which is also an HP solution provider, said she was surprised to hear that HP was going direct. "What are they thinking about with this?" she said. "It leaves a bad taste in my mouth."

Alvarez said a direct-only approach will not work with small businesses. "The problem is, most users aren't aware of online backup as an option," he said. "When you want to deal with small business owners, you need to sit down and discuss security and how storage impacts their business. You can't do that by sending out flyers or brochures."

A third category of vendors includes companies that have traditionally focused on the consumer and small business market with lower-cost technology that is typically offered direct, but which may also go through resellers. These include small companies like Carbonite, Boston, and Amazon S3, an offering of Amazon Web Services, which provides a highly scalable, reliable, and inexpensive data storage infrastructure on which other businesses can build an online storage infrastructure for their own services.

Solution providers looking to offer storage as a service can work with one or more of these and other vendors in a couple of different ways. Those with their own hosted infrastructures that include a large amount of storage capacity can license the technology and software from a vendor and offer their own end-to-end hosted online storage service.

Other solution providers can contract with the technology vendor or a third-party hosted storage provider to handle the back end, while the solution provider deals with customers. In this case, they can either offer a service branded by the vendor, or work with the vendor to rebrand the service to fit the solution provider's other services.

Several vendors allow customers to back data up to both a local storage device and to the remote site simultaneously, a feature that solution providers say is very important.

The move to offer a local storage option stems from the fact that lost or corrupted files can be restored from an on-site storage device faster than they can from online. While some provide the local storage device, others provide the connection to customers' existing storage devices.

Combs said his customers often back their data up to a low-cost USB hard drive as part of the eFolder service. "So if they lose a file, they can restore it from their $110 to $120 USB hard drive," he said. "It's not their main backup, but it does fast restores."

Steward said that local backup is a must-have, not an option, for her customers. "Our customers do pretty much what we tell them to do," she said.

Going forward, the online storage as a service business can only grow because customers' storage requirements can only grow, Daniel at Truistic said.

"Individuals and businesses are creating a lot of digital content," he said. "There has to be a point at which the cost of online storage is so low that customers will want to store all their files online. For instance, one of my law firm customers is now transitioning its paper files to an online warehouse. It's looking at ways to keep all its data online forever."