Backup is a struggle for both enterprises and small and medium businesses. It’s a complex ecosystem of backup software, networks, servers, disk arrays, and tape systems. Most companies report they are having difficulty completing backups in the time available and when backups fail or complete with errors, it’s often very difficult to discover the root cause. Couple those troubles with the fact that the amount of data that you need backed up is growing conservatively at 30% to 50% per year. Aside from these challenges, most companies are also interested in keeping backups longer for version history and companies are interested in the ability to perform much faster restores if they could.

Given the headaches associated with backup, many small and medium business and even some enterprises are choosing to outsource their backups all together to a service provider. There are already numerous players in the marketplace from Evault (which is resold by a number of different service providers) to Iron Mountain, to your telecommunication provider, and to emerging entrants such as Berkeley Data Systems and its Mozy service offering. This opportunity is so huge that even Symantec (which acquired Veritas) launched a beta of its own online backup service called the Symantec Protection Network. EMC’s acquisition of Berkeley Data Systems is just further proof that the online backup market is a huge opportunity.

Online backup is just the beginning. It’s just the first step towards the delivery of multiple infrastructure related services such as archiving, security and advanced disaster recovery services offered as service to IT operations professionals. Iron Mountain has a range of these types of services. This is a positive development for companies; it offers the opportunity to sign up for services with clear, capacity based pricing to offload IT operations that are necessary but not a competitive differentiator in the way the company delivers products and services.

This will be a growing and highly competitive market and competition is good for the end-user.