Storage services are a strong area for VARs
Even during hard times, companies continue to generate mountains of digital data, and so the storage business is a good option for VARs and MSPs looking for new services to offer. R.W. Baird's Q3 Enterprise VAR Survey showed an overall negative third quarter, although the study showed storage to be the strongest area of IT spending. According to the survey, 80 percent of resellers surveyed said that storage would be the strongest IT category for the second half of this year. While the survey showed servers and PCs as being the weakest category, most respondents considered storage to be non-discretionary.
Going into this business as a managed service provider can be costly though. A company called Asigra has a solution that partners can use to avoid the high upfront cost typically associated with backup and recovery software. The deal makes it affordable for partners to offer enterprise backup, recovery, and data vaulting solutions for customers of all sizes. Partners can either use their own data center or take advantage of a co-location center of an Asigra partner.
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Online "self-storage" industry mirrors offline pack-rats
It's interesting to find that this is so non-discretionary.It kind of mirrors the self-storage industry, where even people with decent-sized homes can't declutter enough to fit it all in.
That's why where there are so many physical self-storage centers.
In a weak economy, I'd expect some households at the margin to work harder to declutter to eliminate several-hundred dollars/year in self-storage rental expenses.
I wonder if the same thing will happen as department managers feel the heat from internal IT departmental charges for crazy amounts of storage.