'MSPs are under tremendous pressure to deliver more while working in a distributed and remote way' - Q&A with Cohesity's David Kosman

What will a high performing MSP look like in five years' time?

Leading managed service providers will evolve from hosting and management to becoming influencers and strategic decision makers.

We believe that MSPs will continue to rise up the value chain, leveraging public cloud, automation, and AI, and will be able to position themselves as digital transformation partners to large, global enterprises.

As cloud and IT become increasingly central to organisations, MSPs will evolve to become the partner that keeps the digital center of a company humming.

How are you supporting your MSP partners through the COVID-19 crisis?

MSPs - particularly those with practices in financial services, healthcare, digital workspaces, and e-commerce, have seen a spike in their demand. And with that comes the responsibility of being more resilient and secure than ever.

Cohesity is helping its service provider partners manage this exponential increase in data volume by keeping it consolidated, accessible, and safe during this crisis.

With recently-released service provider features such as per-tenant encryption, data-lock, and ransomware protection, we're helping service providers have one less thing to worry about, and instead focus on delivering outstanding customer service in this time.

What backup/continuity trend will have the biggest impact on the MSP space over the next five years?

Backup and continuity will become part of a larger data management landscape. As companies struggle with managing the explosion in data volume across many (and increasing) silos, simply backing up those silos will only exacerbate mass data fragmentation. Backup and continuity needs to merge into broader, more strategic data management services.

Backup will stop being an insurance policy, and evolve to becoming a business intelligence driver.               

What are the main challenges and opportunities facing your MSP partners during the COVID-19 crisis?

Our MSP partners - like the broader IT industry - have seen varying impact of the pandemic. While some MSPs have been pressed to keep their costs low in the wake of thin demand, others working closely with government and healthcare are under tremendous pressure to deliver more while working in a distributed, remote modality. But regardless of what hand they've been dealt - our MSP partners continue to put their customers and employees first. Several of our MSPs have published how they have managed to keep almost everyone occupied and payrolled, while maintaining their SLAs with their customers.

What do you see as the next big opportunity for MSPs to grow their backup and continuity offering?

The future belongs to those MSPs that evolve their services portfolio quickly - from point solutions to wider, more strategic, platform-level offerings in data management. Backup and continuity will continue to be a strong necessity amongst enterprises, but those MSPs that combine continuity with automation, data security, AI, and business intelligence will be able to capture a much larger piece of the enterprise IT budget, win larger deals, and most importantly - their customers' trust.

What does it mean to you to be shortlisted for Best Backup/Continuity Offering in the CPI European MSP Innovation Awards?

It is an honour to be recognised by one of the leading channel programmes for such a strategic community. Cohesity prides itself on being 100 per cent channel-driven, and has been relentlessly putting out technology and go-to-market updates for the service provider community. With the CPI European MSP Innovation Awards, we hope to reach more MSPs that are looking to grow into becoming strategic digital transformation partners to their customers.