Customers will not be able to recover their data quickly enough after an outage

A huge number of businesses will soon not be in a position to recover their data quickly enough after an outage, according to research from StorageCraft.

The storage vendor has published findings from a global study of over 700 IT decision makers, and found that nearly half believe that day-to-day operations will suffer because of an inability to get up and running fast enough following disruption.

Florian Malecki, international product marketing senior director, told CRN that many businesses are not well enough equipped to handle the amount of data they will soon be producing.

"With 5G coming along this year, IoT, and with technology generally, we as a society will be generating more data, so from a security point of view the customer and their partners will need to make sure they have the right solution in place to both secure this data and recover it," he said.

"Whether it's an MSP or a more traditional product reseller, these guys will have a bigger role to play. It's about trying to make things easier and more cost effective for end users, and also putting the right policies and processes in place to recover the data."

Malecki said that in a lot of cases, businesses would be creating unstructured data, which poses a challenge for IT teams.

He gave the example of a car dealership franchise, Martins Group, based in the South of England.

The business recently started taking before-and-after images, as well as videos, of the cars it repaired in order to improve the quality of its customer service.

However, the business' storage capabilities were not sufficient to handle the increase in data.

"It's a good move because it improves customer satisfaction, which is good for business," Malecki said. "But the IT guy knew that the secondary storage was obsolete and so they had to find a new solution."

He explained that Martins had two Windows 2008 file servers that needed to be replaced as they reached end of life, but added that the business could not afford any down time.

In conjunction with partner Hampshire Business Computers, StorageCraft installed a solution that enables the business to scale at will.

It also takes data snapshots every 90 seconds to help protect against ransomware.

"This is not a huge company, but because of their business initiatives they are making more data than ever and that is only going to grow," Malecki said.

"Particularly in the SMB and mid-market, end users are going to have to deal with vast amounts of data that they did not have to deal with five years ago.

"Partners have a role to play in terms of maximising existing infrastructure, then providing solutions that will accommodate the data explosion. A lot of partners have to educate end users because some aren't aware that they have it coming their way."

Recruitment drive

Malecki said that StorageCraft has typically worked with small MSPs in the UK, with between 10 and 15 employees who service local geographies.

However, he said that the partner type has diversified over recent years, as StorageCraft has expanded its product line outside its traditional backup and recovery space.

The vendor has started to work with larger MSPs and MSPs that have acquired other businesses and want to standardise, as well as traditional hardware resellers.

"We have added cloud services, our own disaster recovery as a service and our own datacentres," he said.

"We have also added products around Office365 and G-Suite and also secondary storage.

"So if it's a partner dealing with one of StorageCraft's competitors from a backup point of view, but they need a solution with enterprise-type solutions to store it that won't break the bank, they could use [our second storage product] OneXafe.

"We have blocks of solutions that can be used together or independently of each other."

This article is published in partnership with StorageCraft