With data sprawl on the rise and 73% of businesses considering a switch in backup providers, MSPs have a golden opportunity to rethink their business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) services and boost recurring revenue.
Your customers’ data is everywhere today—in the cloud, in SaaS and collaboration apps, on endpoints, and on on-site servers. And if for any reason they can’t access their data—or worse, lose it—that could put them out of business or seriously damage their reputation.
That’s why it’s time to reevaluate the backup solutions you offer your clients. While backup is table stakes for most MSPs, it’s also a potential gold mine that can deliver new recurring revenue in the current world of hybrid environments, multi-cloud, and remote work.
“If we follow the data, we follow the money,” says Frank DeBenedetto, general manager, MSP Suite, Kaseya.
Where Is the Data?
More than 50% of workloads and applications (IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS) run in public cloud environments, according to The State of SaaS Backup and Recovery Report 2025. The findings, based on a survey of more than 3,000 IT professionals conducted by Backupify, a Kaseya company, also project that percentage to climb to 61% over the next two years.
“There’s data sprawl, and budgets are tighter than ever before,” DeBenedetto notes. “What we find, too, is that MSPs will end up with a multitude of backup vendors because the data moves all over and they don’t view their current provider as adequate to back up where the data has gone.”
What Are the Pain Points?
At the same time, less than half (40%) of the organizations surveyed are confident in their backup systems’ ability to protect critical data in the event of a crisis, and 30% worry their organization doesn’t have a good enough backup and recovery solution. Plus, 28% say their backup and recovery offering has not evolved in five years.
No surprise, then, that 73% of respondents say they are likely to switch providers in the next 12 months.
For organizations with data in the cloud, nearly 30% of respondents say it would take days to recover from an incident, and 10% would need weeks, potentially leading to significant disruptions and downtime.
Time to Talk Recovery
While MSPs sell backup solutions, what your customers are really buying is recovery, DeBenedetto says. “What they’re really looking for is the ability to restore back to a point in time like an incident never happened, so you want to instill 100% confidence in your ability to recover their data.”
When you’re selling backup solutions, the challenge is getting customers to understand the value rather than focus on price, he notes. To do so, you need to discuss their recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO/RPO).
Simply put, their RTO is the maximum length of time that the system could be down following a failure. RPO is the maximum amount of data they could lose that’s acceptable. “Those answers drive the cost of the solution,” DeBenedetto says.
Ryan Rolfsmeier, CEO of Simplified IT Solutions, an MSP in Lafayette, Colorado, says customers that must meet regulatory requirements like CMMC or FTC have stringent recovery objectives. For his customers that require less than four hours of downtime, Datto SIRIS for BDR is his go-to. “They have to invest in an appliance where you can failover to the appliance and run the network on the appliance. There’s not a lot of vendors that do that well. If I need that failover capability I’m going to choose Datto every time.”
How Many Backup Solutions Do You Need?
Today, a typical MSP is working with three or more backup vendors to provide protection everywhere customers need it. With Kaseya’s IT Complete Unified Backup Solutions, you can safeguard your customers’ business-critical data against ransomware, data loss, and downtime—no matter where the data lives.
Rolfsmeier is a good example of that. He also uses Datto SaaS Protection, which is included with his Kaseya 365 User license, and Datto Endpoint Backup, which is included in his Kaseya 365 Endpoint license. As a result, the cost of providing those services is greatly reduced, and his margin has gone up.
And because customers’ backup needs can change, Kaseya’s FLEXSpend program lets MSPs switch their spend between Kaseya’s suite of backup solutions. For example, DeBenedetto says, “If you have on-prem backup and you still have a year-and-a-half left on that appliance and you want to move them to Azure, you’re not stuck with that appliance. You can shift that spend over to our Azure backup.”
He adds, “We’re here to be the easiest backup vendor that you could work with on the planet.”
Opportunity Awaits
With nearly three-quarters of survey respondents likely to switch backup providers, the time to act is now. MSPs who win these deals will be those who can recover their clients’ data no matter where it lives.
