Turning Cloud Sense into Dollars

As small and medium businesses (SMBs) continue to increase their use of cloud services, web hosters have been asking, “How can I leverage this opportunity to better serve my customers’ needs and grow my business?” Here are some tips on how offering a competitive core bundle and upselling value added services can be a successful way to increase your average revenue per user (ARPU), reduce churn and differentiate your services.

•    Increase ARPU - To increase the revenue your customers generate, you need to continuously offer them new services. Upselling and cross-selling additional services and products—both during and after the point of sale—will play a major role in maximizing revenues from your existing customer base.

•    Reduce customer churn - Customer retention is the litmus test of your ability to differentiate yourself as a service provider and demonstrate to your customers you understand their needs. Studies show that when SMBs buy additional services through their Web service provider, they are less likely to leave. You can also differentiate yourself by engaging customers with great service; educating them on how to derive the greatest value from the solutions they purchase from you; and offering them outstanding support.

But how can you determine which solutions SMBs need? Our Parallels SMB Cloud Insights™ research can help give you the answers:
 

30% of SMBs plan to add site building tools in the next three years – to capture your fair share, offer Parallels Web Presence Builder, a full-featured website design tool that any SMB can use. With Parallels Web Presence Builder, you can attract new customers and differentiate your services by offering try-and-buy evaluations or configuring a freemium website offer and upselling to paid or hosting packages.

50% of US SMBs have or plan to build mobile websites – with the highest growth in next three years. The time to start selling mobile optimized websites is now and UNITY Mobile will enable your customers to quickly create and publish a mobile site that run on any mobile phone and tablet. You can offer mobile services bundled or as standalone and UNITY Mobile products also offer you upsell options.

44% of SMBs are concerned about security - Web Hosters can help reduce security fears by upselling key services such as StopTheHacker, a great website security solution to help your customers prevent, detect and quickly recover from hacker or malware attacks. Another important application is CloudFlare, which extends your network globally with 23 points-of-presence on four continents, making your customer’s websites load twice as fast, while keeping them safe and optimized.

If you’re an Infrastructure Provider, you should offer server-wide services to protect your customers, secure your reputation and improve customer satisfaction - Parallels Premium Antivirus and Parallels Premium Outbound Antispam are two must-have applications. With Parallels Plesk Panel Power Pack you can extend Parallels Panel capabilities with high-value add-ons. As an example, Panel Power Pack includes five mailbox licenses for Kaspersky Antivirus server-side e-mail scanning software. These licenses are resalable, so you can use them to upsell your customers to additional mailbox protection, you can also upsell to an unlimited per server license.

Leslie McGuire
Channel Marketing Director

Selling Value in the Cloud

Cloud brokerage makes a great deal of sense to the channel. Take vanilla services from a variety of vendors, package them with (or without) your own secret sauce, and sell them with your own SLA wrapped around them. It’s a classic channel solution sell. That said, this brings VARs and ISPs into conflict with IT departments – which, in the past, have been the owner of the service guarantee within each organization, and which may be feeling increasingly marginalized by the migration of application and resource management to the cloud. In this article by John Zanni, VP of service provider marketing and alliances at Parallels he discusses how Cloud brokerage turns resellers into VARs again.

Read the article on ChannelPro.

IPv6: Two Years after Implementation in Parallels Plesk Panel

Following the North American IPv6 Summit, I received some questions on what Parallels take is on the IPv6 market and our implementation of this technology.

At Parallels, we believe that it is important to stay on top of internet technology when delivering hosting solutions to thousands of customers. Leveraging the latest stacks can help improve product security, deliver value to customers and give technology companies time to (with feedback from customers) mature and perfect their technology.

For some technology, urgency of implementation is farther driven by hard market requirements. For example, the need for implementation of IPv6 technology is exacerbated by the fact that in some geographies, IPv4 has simply sold out.

 
Parallels implemented IPv6 starting in Parallels Plesk Panel 10.2 two years ago because of the IPv6 ability to improve security and reliability, the ability to offer IPs to a global market, and built-in functionality for Mobile IP. This implementation now fully matured with all versions of Parallels Plesk 10 and Parallels Plesk 11 and it will now be a battle tested mainstream feature in Parallels Plesk 11.5.

We originally selected and will maintain a hybrid IPv6 implementation. The hybrid or dual stack implementation is important because most countries expect that IPv4 and IPv6 will co-exist for several years, so it will be important for sites to be represented in both versions of IP.  Parallels Plesk Panel also supports “pure IPv6” for when no IPv4 is available.

Parallels implementation of IPv6 is designed to support hosters’ needs regardless of the underlying OS and therefore supports multiple Linux OSs including Debian, Ubuntu, CenOS, RedHat, OpenSUSE, CloudLinux and multiple versions of Windows. We use the same multi-OS strategy for Server Name Indication (SNI), a technology which lets hosters have multiple SSL Certs on a single IPv4 address, stretching the dwindling supply of IPv4 addresses.

IPv6 is an important technology today.  Any company that is only now considering implementation of IPv6 is already behind the innovation game as it is a must have feature of the networked hosting world.

Adam Bogobowicz
Sr. Director of Product Marketing

Parallels supports Cisco researcher assessment: “website operators and administrators must keep systems up-to-date.”

Recently, a Cisco security research analyst used an old Parallels Plesk Panel vulnerability as an example of why it is important to patch servers that may be running old software. His point is valid, and Parallels agrees fully that “the active exploit of this year-old vulnerability serves as an important reminder that website operators and administrators must keep systems up-to-date.”

It turns out the exploit this researcher was referring to was (a) for Parallels Plesk Panel 9.3 and earlier – products from 2009 and earlier that are now at end-of-life, and (b) in the 3^rd party Horde webmail component, not in the Parallels Plesk control panel itself. A patch was promptly issued by Parallels in February 2012.

This reported vulnerability – which certainly is not anything new (considering the patch has been out for over a year), was later confused in some subsequent blogs and comments with another vulnerability in Parallels Plesk 10.3 and earlier versions (products from summer 2011 and earlier) also discovered and fixed in February 2012. Though the current version of Parallels Plesk Panel at that time, 10.4, did not have this vulnerability, Parallels immediately issued a security advisory and patches in February 2012 for all prior impacted versions and advised partners about actions to take. Additionally, Parallels created a comprehensive page on securing Parallels Plesk Panel and a Malware Removal Tool, responding quickly and thoroughly to these exploits.

For Parallels partners who install patches and reset passwords, Parallels Plesk Panel is not subject to this vulnerability. Customers running Parallels Plesk Panel 10.4 and 11 never had this vulnerability in the first place.

Parallels agrees that the point of the Cisco researcher is still very valid: “The active exploit of this year-old vulnerability serves as an important reminder that website operators and administrators must keep systems up-to-date. This is especially urgent with vulnerabilities that are remotely detectable. This means not just the operating system, but every program and add-on for those programs also needs to be kept up-to-date. A vulnerability left unpatched in any one of them can lead to total system compromise.”

We strongly encourage our customers to subscribe to our support e-mails by clicking here, subscribe to our RSS feed here and add our KnowledgeBase browser plug-in here.

Parallels Plesk Panel 11 and the upcoming 11.5 are the most secure versions ever, and we strongly encourage our Partners and customers to upgrade to these versions. In Parallels Plesk Panel 11, all Security Updates are clearly reported in the panel. Partners can force Security Updates when they choose. The option to turn on auto-upgrades is also highly recommended for anyone on Parallels Plesk Panel 10 or above.  It is the best way to keep you fully secure.

- The Parallels Plesk Panel Team

The Death of DAS?

For over a decade, Direct Attached Storage (DAS) has been a no-brainer for many organizations; simple, fast and cost-effective. But as applications, compute and storage move to the cloud, DAS is looking like less and less of a sure bet. In fact, it’s looking more like a liability. But migrating from traditional DAS models to cloud storage is not as difficult or complex as it seems, and the good news for VARs and service providers is that they can make recommendations to customers with large DAS estates which, given solid integration and lateral thinking, will allow them to get best use out of what may, initially, seem to be redundant technology.

In this recent piece published on Channel Pro, John Zanni, vice president of service provider marketing and alliances at Parallels takes a look at the drawbacks of DAS in a cloud environment – and what alternatives are out there.

The Death of DAS?

Shared Hosting Transformation and the Control Panel

Structure Research, an independent research and consulting firm with a focus on the hosting and cloud segments within the Internet infrastructure market, recently released an opinion piece titled “Shared hosting transformation and the control panel.”

The blog article provides fresh insight into the future of shared hosting with single-server panel technology vs. multi-server technology, such as Parallels Plesk Automation. Structure Research shares how management tools have not kept up with growth of many hosters. Check out Structure Research’s insights on why hosters’ ability to “scale through operational efficiency will be paramount.”

Good stuff.

Professional’s Choice is the Focus of Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5 Preview

Today Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5 becomes available in a feature-complete preview. With Parallels commitment towards professional hosting, the 11.5 release is focused on professional aspects of the product, including business growth, upgrading, upsell and ease of operations, for both web hosts and website owners. 

Easier to adopt and grow 

Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5 makes it easier to move from previous versions of Parallels Plesk Panel, helping service providers take advantage of the latest technology and security, and rapidly grow their businesses.

We understand that professional hosters are growing and need technology solutions that will make that growth possible. In Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5, the ease of switching from other versions has been designed in, delivering a simplified and reliable transfer experience.

For example, the updated migration manager is designed to identify possible transfer limitations in advance, allowing you to configure new servers with the correct services, disk space and other resources before starting the transfer process.

During transfers, a new and streamlined process will now communicate errors in a way that is easier to identify and react to, and will help with troubleshooting by keeping all relevant logs in a single dedicated folder. For example, everything about recent transfers will be stored in /usr/local/psa/PMM/logs/migration-2013-04-10-19-39-22-557/.

At the same time, we are also enabling the transfer of sites with remote databases (avoiding "database already exists" errors) and improving backup compression by using pigz instead of gzip which reduces backup time up to 3x. (pigz = “parallel implementation of gzip” - a fully functional replacement for gzip that exploits multiple processors and multiple cores to the hilt when compressing data)

Some of our customers are running a mix of old and new panel versions because of the need to support new and old websites running with different PHP versions. With 11.5 you can mix and match PHP versions on a single server, allowing you to consolidate all websites into the latest version of the panel.

Windows hosters will find Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5 to be considerably faster on many backup and upgrade functions. Mail data is backed up and restored differently (not using slow IMAP), and MS SQL backups are sped up significantly by using native MS SQL backups. Additionally, 11.5 introduces deferred file transfer for less traffic and faster response times.

With these changes it will be easier for you to upgrade to the latest version of Parallels Plesk Panel, achieve greater security and comprehensive IPv6 support, prepare to grow into a multi-server solution someday, and deliver new services beyond shared hosting.

Easier to upsell 

With Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5 you can maximize and control your upsell process with management of panel promotions, notifications, and licenses.

With previous versions of Parallels Plesk Panel you had to go outside of the panel to upgrade, upsell or communicate with your customers. With 11.5 and a new License Key Administrator interface called “KA Partner Central” (coming soon – not part of this Preview) you will be able to deliver custom notifications to your users and modify notifications in the panel. Shortly after Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5 releases, we will improve reporting and management of licenses to make it easier to track how and where your Parallels Plesk Panel licenses are used. We’ll also make it easier to add, suspend, or do other typical license operations in a clean, more modern UI.

Along with the growth of the Parallels Plesk Panel catalog of both open source and commercial applications, we have also improved the application experience by adding better search and browse capabilities and a quick unattended application installation experience. To support integration of some premium e-mail applications, such as Open-Xchange, Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5 adds support for the APS Mail Aspect.

Managing applications is also easier in Parallels Panel 11.5. You can install a specific version of an application (for example, if you expect plug-in compatibility issues), and easily keep applications up-to-date. Users get update notifications and can turn on automatic application updating. Hosting providers can turn on forced updates of all applications on the server - to guarantee security patches are loaded, for instance. 

Full Control 

Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5 makes the most sophisticated professional web hosting features available to both Windows and Linux admins in a way that is easy to understand and use.

With older versions of Parallels Plesk Panel, some of our partners were frustrated because we did not give them enough control over the system and had to translate your sophisticated system administrative skills into a “Plesk way” of getting things done. We have addressed this concern in Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5 with many improvements for technical users. Parallels Panel 11.5 is more admin-friendly, so less training time is required. Plus, this latest version empowers webmasters to manage PHP and Web Server settings site-by-site in an SEO-safe manner - which includes appropriate configuration of redirects, domain aliases, www-prefix and appropriate suspend to keep sites showing up in search engines.

Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5 moves to well-understood, standard management practices used by Linux and Windows administrators. For Linux Admins, Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5 significantly simplifies the structure of the user’s home directory, allowing you to put your files where you need them, avoiding confusion with “strange” system folders so you can easily locate what you need. It also makes significant improvements in the CLI (command line interface) for admins who want to bypass the GUI to operate more rapidly.

Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5 makes the server administrator and infrastructure provider’s life easier with support of the well-known Atomic and Remi repositories which provide multiple 3rd party updates. To gain maximum performance, our new Hybrid Web Server can send static content and PHP scripts to nginx, while other scripts can still be executed in Apache. Plus, for convenience, database users can access multiple databases with the same credentials for all databases they have access to.

We enable multiple versions of PHP on any server, and you can define the PHP version used per website. This can be your custom PHP build or PHP downloaded from an alternative repository. Additional versions are selected per site and work with the FastCGI or CGI handlers.

Improved security is addressed through support for additional administrators on Linux (so there is no need to share passwords) and by secure FTP, so you can be PCI compliant and mitigate risks of intercepted user passwords.

Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5 is the most sophisticated and feature rich panel product on the market, delivering unparalleled control and professional grade usability and administration. Spending less time on administration and training new admins will drive increased efficiency.

With Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5, you are also only a step away from a next-level multi-server professional hosting solution, Parallels Plesk Automation. This solution is a natural evolution of Parallels Plesk Panel, and allows you to centralize mail and administration, manage Linux and Windows web hosting on the same system, and grow into VPS and services hosting over time. Only Parallels Plesk Panel gives you a clear path to growth. 

Best Usability for Website Owners

Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5 lowers support and churn by delivering best-in-class usability for website owners.

Website and domain management is at the core of Parallels Plesk Panel. Although the prior version 10.x GUI looked attractive, the usability for websites and domains operations required improvement.

For Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5 we reworked the user interface to make working with sites more comfortable. Now, the Websites and Domains tab is the home screen with all domains and websites listed prominently on this screen. Our new Active List feature saves time for website owners by giving them more information about their sites and domains along with common tasks in an easy to navigate interface. We are also introducing graphical help screens, built-in operations search, entity search and training videos along with fully searchable documentation.

For email in Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5, you will have more choice of webmail clients – including Roundcube and Horde IMP 5.0.

Taken together these additions improve customer self-service and satisfaction, lowering support costs and customer churn risks for service providers.

You can download Parallels Plesk Panel 11.5 Preview here: http://www.parallels.com/download/plesk/11.5

Adam Bogobowicz, Sr. Director of Product Marketing

cPanel is Built for Speed?

cPanel claims big victory, announces it is now only 3x slower than Parallels Plesk Panel

cPanel recently revealed they cut their product install time by an average of 30% and are now able to achieve install times of 50 minutes. This is still more than 3x slower than Parallels Plesk Panel. This less than impressive claim is promoted as the reason one might choose cPanel. If you use install time as a main criteria for choosing a panel you have a clear winner: Parallels Plesk Panel with 15 minutes install time. 

I’ve talked to a number of hosters running both Parallels Plesk Panel and cPanel and their non-lab experience confirms these results. They are reporting cPanel 11.36 default installations taking over 2 hours and Parallels Plesk Panel 11 installations less than 18 minutes. With mirror Parallels Plesk Panel repository, local install source, they are installing Parallels Plesk Panel in under 6 minutes.

Let me know how this compares with your experience.  

Adam Bogobowicz, Sr. Director of Product Marketing for Service Providers at Parallels

Eight reasons why hosting companies fail

by Adam Bogobowicz, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Service Providers, Parallels

One can learn plenty from good advice but nothing is a better teacher than a respectable failure. I was talking about it with my colleagues, Michael Fountain (mfountain@parallels.com) and Alex Goncharov (alex@parallels.com) who are 10+ year veterans of the hosting industry, and we decided to compile a list of reasons for why good (small) hosting companies fail with some tips on how to avoid it with your own business. We know that this list is far from comprehensive, so if there is a lesson that you would like to share with fellow hosters please comment on the blog on this site or send us e-mail. And of course if you lived through one of these disaster scenarios yourself, please share it with the world.

They gave it away for free in the hope of making it up in volume

There are a few well-funded hosting companies, still in business, which tried this strategy. Some of them do get lucky and if you think about Facebook - very lucky! But if you are starting out and are funded with your savings, credit card and your folks’ money, you would be surprised how quickly these funds evaporate if you give your services away for free. On the other hand, if you just got funded $40M by venture capital to give away your services, enjoy it, but plan to sell your business before the cash runs out.

Quick Tip: If you are interested in how to make Freemium model work please read my previous related blog at http://blogs.parallels.com/serviceprovider/2013/2/6/now-you-can-have-your-website-and-eat-it-too.html

They paid more to acquire a customer (ads &/or affiliate commissions) than the customer’s Life Time Value

This is a less over-the-top case than the one above and is driven by focusing on wrong measures for the business or just ignoring the financials of the business. I have seen an extreme case of this miscalculation with a company that was willing to pay 10 times Life Time Customer Value to acquire new customers. It was done in the spirit of hoping to make up the difference in the future, but with even most basic financial calculation it quickly appeared to be as problematic as a Madoff-style pyramid scheme.

Quick Tip: Some providers can pay a lot more for customers' clicks because they upsell customers with value-add services (Internet connectivity, e-commerce packages, web design, system administration services etc.) This is why, for example, cost-per-click for hosting related keywords can go as high as $25 per click. If, however, your conversion rate is only 10%, your per customer acquisition cost will be $250, which is too high for the majority of hosting companies. Investing in lower frequency, local, niche keywords and focusing on Search Engine Optimization could help to resolve this issue.

For more information on Customer Life Time Value concept you can read this blog http://blogs.parallels.com/serviceprovider/2013/3/11/understanding-hosting-marketing-measures.html

Their customer on-boarding process took too long

Customers today are used to instant gratification when they make a purchase online. They expect the next screen they see to be the one that holds the information telling them what they just purchased. If you take 24 hours to process an order, you may think that’s reasonable, but it’s not. Automation is your friend. Use it. Also, don’t make your customers tell you their life story. Stop asking for a fax number! When is the last time you used a fax machine to process an order? The more things you ask for on your order form, the more time your customers spend thinking about if they really want your service or not. Don’t make them think that hard.

Quick Tip: Asking customers to provide simple contact information (Name, Phone, Email) in the beginning of purchase process and immediately posting it to your CRM is a very good idea. You can call every customer who did not complete the purchase in minutes and help them to finish the purchase. Also customers are willing to provide more information once they have paid for your order.

They got bad a support reputation

I personally know many hosters who put a phone number on their site and then don’t answer the phone. Do not get a bad support reputation - it will kill you. People talk and when they do, they like to acknowledge other people’s mistakes. So, don’t put a Twitter handle on your site if you are not setup to respond to customer tweets within 30 minutes! Set expectations early and set expectations often. If you mess up and it becomes public, then resolve it publically. Your customers are watching.

Quick Tip: Use virtual phone system. You will be surprised how affordable their fees are. For example http://mightycall.com is less than $10/month.

Fraud got their merchant account shut down

Let’s face facts…if you sell services online, you will be the victim of fraud sooner rather than later. Automation is great, but it must be done in a way that lowers your risk to fraudulent transactions. Not implementing any fraud prevention measures is a guaranteed way to get your merchant account or credit card process account terminated due to too many fraudulent transactions that result in charge backs. And this is not a rare scenario. Anybody who has been in this industry a few years knows a business that faced this problem. 

Quick Tip: One of the ways to deal with this problem is to use a hosting automation system that comes with large number of Fraud Screening tools, flexible manual approval rules and support for PREAUTH, also well known as “Authorization Hold” credit card processing. With Preauth processing your hosting automation captures the funds and waits for you to approve it manually after looking at and considering all the information from Fraud Screening tools.

They didn’t know how to reboot a server without a control panel

Hosting is a business with minimum technical skill requirement. This problem (not having technical chops to run a hosting business) is a fairly recent phenomenon because as hosting technology gets simpler, many new hosters come into this industry without a deeper understanding of the underlying hosting technology. We have seen over the last two years quite a few startup hosting companies without Linux or Windows admin skills that got themselves in serious trouble when technical issues outside of the panel happen to their business… and problems do happen… just ask a hoster.

Quick Tip: Consider buying and using hosting infrastructure and automation products that come with unlimited support, such as Parallels Plesk Automation or make sure your support contract is 24x7, valid and active. If you cannot afford to hire a good system administrator right now, grow your own – gradually train and certify your support engineers, so they eventually will become very good system administrators with some practice. Many Software Vendors provide technical training for free or this can be negotiated during purchase. When Alex was managing his hosting business he managed to get MCSE training for all his support engineers sponsored by Microsoft for free. Did you know that you can have your engineers trained to manage Parallels Business Automation Standard for free?

The server was in a closet on a Comcast cable pipe

Ok, this one is just silly but you would not believe how common. I have seen desktop PC in the kitchen playing the role of a datacenter. I can understand this when hosting is done in a developing country where leasing a box is not an option, but if you choose to run your own servers instead of leasing from one of many infrastructure providers in US or Europe, you are wasting your money and asking for a disaster.

They thought that Excel was a wonderful billing automation solution

You would be amazed to see how many hosters are using Excel on their desktops to bill their customers… and when the hard drive fails they go out of business. Excel was OK for a small hosting business to keep track of customers, hosting plans, billing cycles, IPs, servers, when you had your first 10 customers, but eventually when your enterprise starts to grow, you sure need to move to a proper hosting automation and billing solution.

Quick Tip:  Automate your hosting business. Get hosting automation that provides full range of traditional hosting services right out of the box: domain registration, shared hosting (Linux/Windows), VPS hosting (Linux/Windows), Hypervisor-based VMs, dedicated servers, SSL certificates. Reconsider your .xls billing strategy and take a look at http://www.parallels.com/products/pba-standard/

Cloud backup is a great business opportunity, but is it for you?

By Pavan Vyas, Product Marketing Manager, Asigra

As you look to expand your managed service practice, should you be looking at offering cloud services, specifically cloud backup?  With the rapid growth of both structured and unstructured data taking place in organizations today, companies are struggling with protecting this data. In specific verticals such as financial services and healthcare, organizations must even have a data protection strategy in place for compliance purposes.  These data points may cause you to have a number of questions – the foremost being - Is offering cloud backup and recovery services lucrative?  Can I make money offering cloud backup services?  The answer to both those questions is “Yes”.

In this blog post, I am going to provide you with some tips and point you to a great resource that can help you with taking this all important business decision. As a company that has helped numerous service providers across the world make the move to the cloud and build successful cloud backup and recovery services using our enterprise software platform, we know that the cloud backup market is not for everyone. So, who makes an ideal candidate for offering cloud backup services? How do you decide if it is the right business venture for you?

 As always the first step in any such process is, understanding your current business situation and your customers’ needs. There are about seven critical questions that you should be asking yourself such as “Do you have customers in highly regulated industries”? or “On an average how much incremental backup data do your customers generate each month?”. You can find those questions in this paper titled “Assessing your cloud backup opportunity”.  As you go through this assessment, not only will you determine if offering cloud backup services is right for your business, you will also uncover new ways of thinking about your customers. This can help you grow your business with your existing customers, develop strategies for attracting new customers and obtain higher levels of customer satisfaction.

 In this process of self discovery, if you ever need any help in understanding where you stand vis-à-vis your customers’ needs, we suggest that you reach out to some of your largest and trusted customers. By engaging them through surveys, interviews, or even one-on-one discussions, you can get any data points that you don’t have or answer questions that you are struggling with by yourself.

As important as it is that cloud backup services make sense to your customers, it is also critical that cloud backup services fit in with the rest of your practice today – both technologically and psychologically. It is essential that your customers can feel comfortable in trusting you to keep their critical business data - the lifeblood of their business - safe. It is also important that their current experience in working with you paves the way towards their having that confidence in you. We have a set of questions that can help you determine if cloud backup fits in well with your existing business and if this is the right time for you to proceed on making it a core component of your service offerings.  Make sure to spend some time thinking through those questions.

Cloud backup managed services offers tremendous opportunities for service providers like you. We can vouch for this based on the experience of service providers in our own ecosystem. We are sure our paper will help you make the right business decisions about entering the cloud backup and recovery market, just like it has done for so many of our hybrid partners over the decades!