Top Channel-Friendly Cloud Backup and Recovery Service Providers

It seems like everybody and their mother has jumped on the cloud backup and recovery bandwagon, and narrowing down the list when choosing a service provider can be tough. David Hill, principal at Mesabi Group, compared the industry (partly in jest) to an old Smothers Brothers routine in which the brothers proclaim that anybody can be a cowboy just by putting on the chaps. “Having the name is not necessarily having the game, but everybody talks about cloud,” Hill said. It seems like everybody -- from the big guns like Amazon and EMC to the tiniest start-ups -- is getting into the cloud backup and recovery business. Data center transformation is partly driving the move to the cloud for backup and restore, and there are a plethora of reasons for using these services. Businesses are using cloud backup and restore for remote mirroring, as an addition to on-premise storage, and for data center migration purposes. “In the public cloud, people are using software-as-a-service capabilities to basically vault their data over to the other site, and one of the things they can do is snapshots,” Hill said. The opportunities for cloud providers and their channel partners are growing, but first, you need to know who to partner with. Here we take a look at seven channel-friendly cloud backup and recovery service providers that you should consider.