MSPs are looking for ways to scale their business while managing costs, and backup can be part of the solution. That’s why we’ve teamed up with Comet Backup to explore how backup can unlock growth.
Backup is one of the most dependable line items on most MSP invoices, and probably one of the least discussed in strategy meetings. It’s bundled, it’s expected, and as long as things run smoothly, nobody gives it much thought. That’s a missed opportunity. What backup does for your customers has changed dramatically in the past few years—and so has the role it can play in how your business grows and how that growth impacts the bottom line.
Backup has quietly changed jobs
The basic promise hasn’t moved: copy the data, restore it when something goes wrong. What’s changed is everything around it. Customer data now lives across endpoints, servers, virtual environments, SaaS platforms, and Cloud services, and plenty of customers still assume that anything in the Cloud is automatically safe.
“Just because it’s stored in the Cloud or they’re utilizing a Cloud service doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s protected,” says Josh Flores, General Manager at Comet Backup. “That still leaves a huge opportunity for people to be selling backup and providing it as a service.”
Backup has also moved firmly into security territory. IBM research found that AI-driven cyberattacks increased by 56% in 2025/26, with the average breach costing $6m. Attackers go after backups as a matter of course, which puts immutable copies and object lock squarely in the security conversation.
Customers don’t just want to know their data is backed up—they want confidence it’ll still be there after an incident, and that recovery will be fast. Backup underpins compliance and sovereignty discussions too, and, in some cases, migrations between platforms.
Bundled doesn’t mean finished
Here’s the catch for anyone hoping backup will become a shiny new upsell: it’s already in the bundle.
That doesn’t make backup less valuable—it moves the growth opportunity. The extra revenue potential is now about expansion rather than the initial sale, whether that’s longer retention, more frequent backups, or protecting servers and Microsoft 365 as the customer matures.
Customers rarely stand still, either. They add users, sites, SaaS apps, and hardware, and every change creates something new to protect. If an MSP isn’t paying attention, a customer might spin up a side project with a pile of new kit, and suddenly “there’s this whole area of their business that’s completely unprotected”, says Flores. That’s risk for the customer and lost revenue for the MSP—and MSPs will only spot it if they’re having honest conversations with clients about where the business is heading.
Handled well, backup opens doors in both directions. It can be your way into a new account where existing protection is patchy, or the gap you uncover after coming in through networking or security work.
The hidden cost eating your margin
If revenue is one half of the story, cost to serve is the other, and it’s where a lot of MSPs quietly bleed margin. The license fee is the visible part; the staff time isn’t.
“A major issue is having to monitor backup to make sure it’s performing properly,” says Flores. He’s seen MSPs dedicate half a full-time employee’s day just to checking that backups ran and fixing the ones that didn’t.
The business problem is simple: if every new customer adds proportionally more administration, growth gets expensive fast. So when you assess your backup setup, look beyond price per device and calculate the total cost to operate—license, storage, bandwidth and egress, admin hours, and the recovery risk you’re carrying.
Architecture does a lot of the heavy lifting. Deduplication, compression, and differential backups shrink both storage and the data crossing the wire. AI is starting to strip out routine work too; the MSP GLOBAL State of the Industry report found internal AI use for tasks like monitoring and reporting jumped from 55% to 71% between April and July 2026.
Cheap can get very expensive
There’s a flip side to cost control. Cloud storage has become a commodity, and it’s tempting to chase the lowest price. Flores warns against it: if a customer needs their data back but cheap storage has failed, “that’s going to be a pretty uncomfortable conversation.”
The same logic applies to restores. An untested backup is a liability waiting to surface, and a botched recovery can undo years of goodwill in an afternoon. Reliability protects retention, and retention is where recurring revenue compounds.
Where it shows up on the bottom line
Pull these threads together and backup drives growth in four ways:
- More revenue, from protecting more workloads and using backup as a route into new accounts.
- Higher retention, because you become the partner responsible for something the customer can’t afford to lose.
- Better margins, from less manual administration and smarter use of storage and bandwidth.
- More scalable recurring revenue, from a standardized service that can grow faster than your headcount.
None of this requires ripping up your stack overnight. It starts with treating backup as a business lever rather than a checkbox. With MSP GLOBAL just a few weeks away—taking place on October 21–22, 2026, at PortAventura near Barcelona—there’s no better opportunity to up your backup game.
Get the full playbook
Want to go deeper? Download Comet Backup’s Growth Guide for MSPs for a practical look at the six growth engines reshaping backup, the compliance questions your customers will be asking, and what to calculate when evaluating your next backup platform.
Huge thanks to Comet Backup for their expertise and support in creating this article.
