How the platform’s features can enable MSPs to drive incremental revenue by offering data assessments to existing clients.
Recap: The MSP Opportunity
In our previous partner sales blog, we discussed the opportunities for managed service providers (MSPs) that currently specialize in Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) and Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS). They can provide a valuable service by helping their customers understand what redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) data is and how it negatively affects their on-prem/cloud storage footprint. They can also help by increasing their customers’ awareness of the risks involved in not knowing what sensitive personal identifiable information (PII) data they have or where it resides.
Even more important, these MSPs can position their organizations as true strategic partners by helping their customers clean up their data, classify it, and make informed decisions. The Aparavi Platform, used to provide a data assessment program, can make that happen.
Data Assessment Starts with ROT Cleanup
The first step is to help organizations understand what data they have and what to do with it from a high level. As part of our v1.4.0 release earlier this year, Aparavi introduced a feature we call Quick Scan. It allows our partners to offer a data assessment program, in which they seamlessly scan their customers’ entire data sets and report back on how much ROT data was discovered. Typically, they find that 30-40% of the data their customers are hosting is outside of their current data retention policy window. As a part of the v2.0 release for Data Actions, this decreases the customer’s storage footprint onsite and enables them to relocate offsite to additional storage targets or any other type of s3 compatible storage.
Next Step: PII Identification
The Aparavi Platform not only enables scanning to find ROT data. It can use 140 predetermined classification policies to identify PII data (e.g. HIPAA, GDPR, SSN, Financial Information, etc.). Through indexing, metadata classification and automation, the platform can also display a dashboard view to an end user that shows a file breakdown of the PII data. Our partners that use the platform as part of a customer data assessment program also can build custom classification policies to meet their customers’ specific use cases.
Moving the Data
Once their customers’ ROT and PII data has been identified, our MSP partners can leverage the platform’s Data Actions capabilities to help their customers relocate both types of data to AWS Simple Storage Service (S3), S3-compatible storage, or Azure Blob via Network File System (NFS) or Server Message Block (SMB). It’s a great way to help customers reduce storage costs and more cost effectively manage their data across its entire lifecycle. (Watch for future blogs where we’ll cover this in more detail.)