You’re on the right track starting with backup. Every business today should have some type of backup product in place, and most businesses are familiar with it in general. But, you knew a “but” was coming, while backup is necessary, is it enough? Is it enough for businesses to protect themselves against costly downtime? And, is it enough for you to ensure recurring revenue. Quite simply, no.

Marketing super powers like those possessed by The Alchemist are required to keep up in our industry. With the ability to “blend art and science” you can define your strategy and objectives by aligning organizational goals and positioning your brand to aid in new customer acquisition, gain new market share and tie in directly with the revenue generation marketing goals I defined in my previous blog series.

Analyst firm Neovise published a perspective report titled Choosing a Competitive Cloud Backup Solution for Service Provider Success.

No matter how many times I see the numbers, I’m still blown away by the projected growth in unstructured (aka “Big”) data: from 4.4 zettabytes last year (just writing “zettabytes” is a statement in and of itself!) to 44 zettabytes in 2020, according to IDC. That means it’s going to double every two years.

Trends are complicated things. Consider, for example, the threat often called Ransomware. In our annual Internet Security Threat Report, all signs were that it was following a steady growth path which would continue into 2014. However, more up to date intelligence (as documented in our May 2014 Intelligence Report) suggests otherwise. It remains to be seen if the threat is cyclic, so we shall continue to watch with interest