MSPmentor

I spotted a very interesting article on GigaOm today. It explores the factors you should weigh before launching your own storage cloud. It’s a particularly timely read for managed service providers that may own multiple companies, or may be seeking to get economies of scale for multiple customer settings.

Two Rackspace veterans are launching a cloud-based storage service that could give Amazon.com’s Simple Storage Service (S3) a run for its money. The new service, known as Mosso CloudFS, is in private beta and may be of interest to managed service providers (MSPs) that are formulating storage stategies. Here are some quick details.

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Nirvanix, a company that claims to be the “premier Cloud Storage platform provider,” hopes to rain all over Amazon.com’s Simple Storage Service (S3). Like many managed storage providers, Nirvanix is trying to simultaneously counter Amazon.com while also cashing in on publicity around the S3 network. Read More >

The move from managed service provider to software as a service (SaaS) can seem intimidating, but the barriers to market entry continue to fall. Each week, yet another company introduces a SaaS framework that you can plug your managed services business into.

Whether it’s Amazon.com’s Simple Storage Service (S3) or Jamcracker’s expanding Service Delivery Network, MSPs have a growing list of cloud-oriented platforms from which to choose. The continued reinvention of Jamcracker is of particular interest to me. Here’s why.

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If you’re wondering how managed storage services will evolve in the business market, perhaps you should keep an eye on the customer industry. There, Hewlett-Packard and a bunch of start-ups are launching online storage services that promote simple file access and file sharing.

Here’s a look at how the consumer managed storage market is evolving, and how it may soon impact the small business market. Read More >

Web seminars are fantastic for quick, educational tutorials about managed services and business management. Skype and other tools allow us all to connect for free over vast distances.

But as we all consider the economy and our second quarter budgets, one thing just became super-clear to me: We can’t afford to stop traveling to highly targeted industry events. Here’s one example to prove my point. Read More >

There’s nothing like healthy competition to keep a market growing globally. In recent days, managed service platform providers have been busy leapfrogging each other with new announcements about their international efforts and milestones.

Here’s a sampling of the blow-by-blow involving Kaseya, Level Platforms and N-able. Read More >

The vast majority of successful MSPs say they now offer managed storage services. In most cases, I suspect, those services involve basic backup and restore capabilities. Still, a growing number of industry partnerships could help you leap from “backup” services to “contingency planning” services, which are far more strategic.

A case in point: N-able Technologies and Iron Mountain have inked a partnership that could empower managed service providers with Iron Mountain’s LiveVault server backup service. The relationship comes only a few weeks after EMC and Symantec each said they were launching managed storage services for VARs and customers.

More than 70 percent of leading MSPs already offer some form of managed storage, according to our recent MSPmentor 100 report. In order to stand out from the crowd, a growing number of MSPs are coupling automated storage management with on-site contingency planning and other services. Read More >