MSPs & VARs: It’s Time to Consider BaaS

April 12, 2022
Backup, Partner

MSPs & VARs: It’s Time to Consider BaaS


The Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) market is expected to increase by $14.29 billion from 2020 to 2025. If you’re an MSP or reseller, it may be a good time to add BaaS to your portfolio of services.

Data is invaluable to most organizations’ operations, so it makes sense that they’d want to make sure it’s protected and available when they need it – even if some kind of business-disrupting event occurs. However, those that rely on traditional backup methods are wrought with many problems. They can be time consuming, expensive, and not provide strong enough protection to ward off ransomware and other threats.

BaaS, also known as cloud backup, offers an attractive alternative. Data is backed up to a cloud-based server in a remote location. The server can be private or public. The cloud infrastructure and owned and maintained by the service provider, who provides the use of it “as a service” in exchange for a monthly fee.

Instead of investing in infrastructure or worrying about rotating and managing tapes or hard disks at an offsite location, organizations can offload maintenance and management to the provider. These organizations can also benefit from the many benefits associated with the cloud, including its scalability, flexibility, security and more. Many of the more respected providers power their clouds with infrastructure that is PCI and HIPAA compliant, which can lessen the burden for customers in meeting certain compliance requirements.

Benefits of BaaS for Managed Service Providers (MSPs)

BaaS offers end users numerous benefits. But what can offering BaaS to your customers and prospects do for you? Here are a few things to consider.

  • Business Stability. With monthly recurring revenue (MRR), you can count on a more reliable and predictable revenue source, do better business planning, and make your company more valuable.
  • Increased Profitability. A survey of MSPs, VARs and partners showed that on average, gross margins for managed services like BaaS are three times greater than on-premises software and hardware product resales.
  • Higher Client Retention Rate. Selling cloud-based services like BaaS involves ongoing service delivery, creating the kind of “sticky” customers and revenue that those who operate under the “break-fix” model with they had.
  • Easier Financing. Bankers love recurring income, so companies that can demonstrate recurring revenues can get the financial backing they need more easily.
  • More Opportunities. Selling BaaS can open the door to other service opportunities, such as data retention and archive, data cleanup and more.
  • Support. You don’t have to be a backup expert. The best cloud providers offering BaaS work provide exceptional technical support to end users, and sales and technical support to their partners. They work jointly with their partners to keep end users happy.

End User Benefits of BaaS

Just about any organization can benefit from BaaS. That includes those that already have some kind of backup system in place, as well as those that don’t. Chances are your current customers fit in one of these two groups, so start with them.

Are they happy with what they’re doing for backup? Are they concerned about something going wrong and their data being lost? How would downtime and/or data loss affect them? Do they know about BaaS, how it works and the benefits it offers?

This is a great opportunity to show you understand the importance of protecting your customers’ data and can help them do so in a way that is cost-effective and delivers the protection they need – even if they don’t yet know they need it.

Industries That Benefit from BaaS Solutions

While companies in just about every industry must protect their data, some rely more heavily on it than others. They may have a greater need for BaaS solutions that can ensure the availability of their data and, in many cases, help meet some of their compliance requirements as well.

That includes companies in the following industries:

  • Financial Services
  • Healthcare
  • Manufacturing
  • Legal Services

Once you’re ready to reach out to prospects beyond your current customers, talking to organizations in these categories is a good next step.

Essentials for Selling BaaS

Everyone has their own way of selling. The following are just a few simple ways to consider if you’re not already doing them.

  • Know your customers’ and prospects’ pain points when it comes to data backup.
  • Identify the positions within customer and prospect organizations that could benefit most from a BaaS solution. Are they production managers, sales directors, IT managers or something else? How could a BaaS solution alleviate some of the IT concerns that keep them up at night?
  • Be prepared to talk about the costs and causes of downtime. Arm yourself with recent statistics.
  • Build on the trust you’ve established by only connecting your customers and prospects to the best BaaS solution available – one designed to ensure the safety, accessibility, privacy, authenticity and security of their data.
  • Take the time to learn about the product. Take advantage of vendors’ training resources and any FAQs and technical materials. Put yourself in your customers’ and prospects’ shoes. What would you want to know about the product?
  • Try the product yourself first. Ask any vendor you’re considering going with to provide a demo. Note: if the vendor will help you offer demos to your customers and prospects, all the better.

BaaS from US Signal

Many cloud providers offer BaaS solutions. One to consider is US Signal’s BaaS, which is available as a fully managed solution or a manage-it-yourself data backup option.

It’s an agent-based backup and recovery solution, powered by Acronis, which can back up data from any physical or virtual infrastructure or Windows workstation to the US Signal Cloud. Individual servers can be protected by installing the backup agent directly inside any supported operating system. This also provides application protection and recovery supported applications.

All traffic between the client machine and US Signal Cloud storage is transmitted over SSL encryption. The solution can easily be accessed anytime and data restored using the Internet and outgoing TCP ports.

Agents can also be installed on any server with network visibility into the hypervisor, providing a backup and recovery solution for VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V. For efficient backups of SaaS platforms such as Microsoft 365 and G-Suite, all that's needed is the account credentials to set up a backup plan.

Additional Data Management Resources

If you’re interested in more guidance in selling BaaS, take advantage of our free eBook: Selling Backup-as-a-Service, A How-to Guide for MSPs, VARs and Resellers. For more details on US Signal’s BaaS solution and how you can add it to your portfolio, contact US Signal’s Channel Marketing and Events Manager, Lauren Pratt, at [email protected].

For further resources about about data management, check out these articles below from our blog or visit our resource center for whitepapers, e-books and more!

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