Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is increasingly becoming a crucial offering for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) in the USA. To better understand the current state of the industry, the challenges MSPs and their clients face, and the attitudes of those who work in the MSP sector, we leveraged AI-driven audience profiling to synthesize insights from opinions expressed online to a high statistical confidence level.
Our data focused on 72,505 people working for MSPs throughout the US and covered for 12 months ending 12 December 2024. This is what we discovered about the 2024 DRaaS statistics for MSPs.
What Are The Most Common Disaster Recovery Scenarios You Prepare For?
Over 50% of MSPs prepare for natural disasters
The graph below provides insight into the most frequently anticipated disasters and how MSPs prioritize their preparations.
Of our profiled audience, over half (51.5%) of those working for Managed Service Providers most commonly prepare for natural disasters. This focus isn’t unexpected when considering the rise in both the frequency and cost of billion-dollar natural disasters in the last two decades. There’s been a 154% increase in the number of billion-dollar disasters and a 257% surge in costs since 2003, and these numbers keep rising.
Power outages came in second (often a knock-on effect of natural disasters) with 25.9%, followed by cyber attacks at 14.9%. With these attacks also on the rise and the US facing 31 billion attempts in the first six months of 2024, these engagement levels are no surprise either.
Garnering minimal engagement was data loss (3.6%) and hardware failures (1.6%), followed by network failures (0.9%) and human error (0.6%) that hardly registered. Site outages and application failures were the least common disaster recovery scenarios our audience prepared for, tying at 0.5% each and highlighting just how important MSPs consider planning ahead for natural disasters, power outages and cyber-attacks.
What Are The Biggest Challenges Your Clients Face With Disaster Recovery?
27.1% of MSP clients find staff training the biggest disaster recovery challenge
For MSP clients, the biggest challenge amidst data recovery was the human element. Here’s what our data revealed:
While human error may garner minimal engagement in terms of preparation, it’s the human element that most MSP’s clients struggle with when it comes to data recovery. The highest number of MSPs (27.1%) said that staff training was their client’s biggest challenge. Data backup followed at 24.9%, and system recovery at 13.1%.
Despite the average cost of downtime reaching as much as $9,000 a minute, our audience engagement levels were only 9.4%. Testing recovery plans were even lower at 8.8%, with cost management close behind at 8.5% and communication at 5.6%. In the bottom two were vendor management (1.4%) and regulatory compliance (1.1%), which is interesting to note, as in Q3 of 2024, regulators set new records in the number and size of penalties issued. In future, this may well become more of a challenge across organizations.
What DRaaS Solutions Do You Provide?
Nearly 55% of MSPs provide disaster recovery planning solutions
Disaster recovery is the most commonly provided solution amongst our audience, but it’s not the only one. These are the DRaaS solutions our sample group offers:
In 2022, the size of the global disaster recovery as a service market was estimated at $10.2 billion. It’s expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27.2% from 2023 to 2030, highlighting just how integral it’s become to business operations. Of the 72,506 people working for Managed Service Providers who made up our audience, 54.6% of them provide disaster recovery planning as part of their DraaS offering, while 33.9% offer cloud storage.
Interestingly, despite the huge losses downtime can bring, only 6.8% provide backup and recovery services, and just 1.2% provide virtual machine recovery. Testing and validation and scalability options also garnered minimal engagement at just 1.9% and 1.6%, respectively. However, these solutions may be outsourced to other vendors as they’re not as focused on DRaaS.
What Are The Primary Reasons Your Clients Choose DRaaS?
32.8% of MSP clients want managed services
Managed services top the list of why clients choose DraaS. We unpack why this is and what else the data in the graph reveals:
32.8% of the MSPs in our audience say that managed services are the primary reason their clients choose DraaS. This is likely because this business model offers numerous benefits, including improved security, increased productivity, better compliance, and cost savings.
Business continuity came in second at 28.2% and reliability at 19.1%, which is unsurprising when you recall how much downtime can cost a minute. Interestingly, despite the low number of our audience providing scalability solutions, 19.9% said that scalability was a driving reason behind clients choosing DRaaS.
What Challenges Do You Face When Delivering DRaaS To Clients?
Disaster recovery planning the biggest challenge for 90.9% of MSPs
Almost all of our audience cites disaster recovery planning as the biggest client DRaaS challenge. We’ve taken a closer look at the statistics below:
For 90.9% of our MSPs, disaster recovery planning is the biggest challenge when delivering DRaaS to clients. However, when you consider that disaster recovery planning requires meticulous customization, resource allocation, and alignment with each client’s unique infrastructure and business continuity needs this does make sense. Add to this the fact that our audience’s clients found staff training the biggest challenge with disaster recovery, and it adds even more weight to the task.
In contrast, service level agreements only garnered 6.9% engagement, and regulatory compliance a meager 2.2%.
What Metrics Do You Use To Measure The Success Of Your DRaaS Implementations?
Scalability the top MSP success metric at 51.2%
Success in DRaaS can be measured in different ways, and we took a closer look at what our data says about the metrics used by MSPs:
Scalability may not be a commonly provided DRaaS solution, but it’s certainly a client priority—and a metric for success for MSPs. 51.2% use scalability as the top metric to measure the success of their DRaaS implementations, highlighting the importance of growth in any business.
36.4% use uptime percentage, which correlates with avoiding downtime costs, and 12.4% use response time as their success metric. Considering that only around 52% of organizations can restore critical systems in 12 hours or less after a severe data loss event, it’s obvious why this metric is used.
What Additional Resources Support Would Help You Improve Your DRaaS Offerings?
Disaster recovery planning would improve 91.7% DRaaS offerings
It’s evident that disaster recovery planning is the most sought-after resource support for MSPs offering DRaaS. Here’s what else is desired:
Considering our data revealed disaster recovery planning was the biggest challenge for 90.9% of MSPs delivering DRaaS to clients, it makes sense this is also the most sought-after additional resource support for improving DRaaS offerings.
With 91.7% engagement levels for disaster recovery planning, the other additional resources that would offer support barely get a look in. Security solutions (2.8%) and cost management tools (2.1%) attract a little bit of engagement while marketing resources (1.8%) and partnership opportunities (1.6%) barely register.
What Emerging Technologies Features You Believe Will Shape The Future Of DRaaS?
34.7% of MSPs say cybersecurity will shape the future of DRaaS
While cybersecurity tops the list, our audience believes that AI, multi-cloud strategies and numerous other technologies will play a role too:
A disaster recovery plan (DRP) is a vital tool in cybersecurity, ensuring that organizations can recover quickly and effectively from cyber threats. As the threat landscape evolves, so must the strategies and technologies behind these plans. However, the Global Cybersecurity Index 2024 highlights the impact of emerging technologies, which create new vulnerabilities in the cybersecurity landscape. These sentiments are mirrored by MSPs, with 34.7% saying that new cybersecurity features will shape the future of DRaaS.
With 42% of enterprise-scale companies already deploying AI in their business, AI and machine learning unsurprisingly come in second at 23.2%. Multi-cloud strategies follow at 10.5%, serverless architecture at 9.7%, and blockchain technology at 7.4%.
Cloud computing and edge computing both garner low engagement rates of 7% and 5.5%, respectively, but disaster recovery orchestration, data analytics, and automation are surprisingly low, racking up just 0.6% engagement each. With automation being tied so closely to AI and machine learning this low engagement rate is unexpected, but it is likely due to AI and ML being a more blanket term used in multiple technologies.
If You Could Advise Other MSPs Considering Offering DRaaS, What Would It Be?
35.4% suggest data recovery plans for MSPs entering DRaaS
When it comes to advice MSPs would give others entering the DRaaS space, data recovery plans take the top spot again. Our data shows what MSPs consider crucial:
Topping engagement levels, 35.4% of our profiled audience agree that they’d advise other MSPs entering the DRaaS space to develop recovery plans. Once again, this reinforces the need and the importance of these plans. 26.5% said they’d advise them to prioritize compliance, while 23.8% said they’d advise them to communicate effectively, once again going back to the human element and the challenge of training.
Only 14.3% said they’d advise other MSPs to focus on security, which is interesting considering that 39% of MSPs suffer major setbacks when adapting to advanced security technologies.
What Industries Do You Primarily Serve?
Technology the industry served by 72.2% MSPs
From technology to education, our graph below reveals which industries are most served by MSPs in the US:
MSP Resources reports there are approximately 40,000 MSPs in the US, and we surveyed 72,506 people working for these organizations. Of our audience, 72.2%, or roughly 52,349 people, primarily served the technology sector, which aligns with MSP’s IT focus. Other industries that attracted engagement above 4% were healthcare (6.9%), which has an increasing focus on IT, retail (5.8%), and telecommunications (4.6%).
Industries that achieved very minimal engagement were manufacturing (3.9%), government (3.3%), hospitality (1.7%), and lastly, education (1.6%). Of these, it’s interesting to note manufacturing scored so low as this is an industry where disaster recovery is crucial, however it is perhaps not commonly outsourced to MSPs.
Demographics
When assessing the insights from opinions expressed online, we also examined our audience’s demographics:
Age
Majority of people working for MSPs over 65
Of those working for MSPs, the oldest age group was the largest. Here’s how our audience stacked up:
The age group older than 65 had the highest level of engagement (31.4%), followed by those aged 55-64 (25.4%). The next most engaged group was aged 45-54 (18.4%), showing a decline of between 6 and 7% per decade. With the labor force participation rate expected to increase to 30.4% by 2033 for those aged 65 to 74, the older generation of MSP workers could maintain the majority for several years to come.
What is interesting to note is the disparity between those in the 35-44 age group (10.1%) and the 25-34 group (3.8%). This rapid decrease reverses in the lowest age bracket, reaching 10.9% again for those aged 25 and below, highlighting a potential shift in preferences or behaviors among younger demographics.
Gender
Men over 12% more likely to work in MSPs than women
There’s a gender gap in those employed by MSPs in the US, and our graph reveals what it is:
Statista reports that in 2023, 75.5 million men worked full-time in the U.S. compared to 58.56 million women. However, our survey data showed that when it came to ransomware attacks, women and men are affected almost equally. Male engagement racked up 50.8%, while female came in just below at 49.2%.
Region
25.4% MSPs located in Pacific US
In our graph, we track where our audience lives in the US. This is what the regional distribution reveals:
25.4% of MSPs are based in the Pacific, which aligns with California and Washington, both of which are listed in the top ten states for the most tech jobs (first and sixth, respectively). Virginia is also on the list at number five and Georgia at number ten, and our data places the South Atlantic as the second-highest region for MSPs at 23.9%.
East North Central gets an average 12.6% engagement, followed a little behind by West South Central (9.3%) and East South Central (8.5%). However, after this, engagement levels plummet, with the Mid-Atlantic only garnering 6.5%, despite the presence of New York, which has the biggest business district in the country. New England, Mountain, and West North Central round off the list with 5.8%, 4% and 3.9% engagement.
Income
42.2% MSP workers earn between $200k and $500k
With over a third of MSP workers falling into the second highest income group, we unpack which income groups our profiled audience belong to.
The average salary in the US may be $62,027, but the vast majority of our audience earns above this. So much so that only 1% earn under $40,000, and 4% earn between $40,000 and $80,000. Nearly half of MSP workers earn between $200,000 and $500,000, while a healthy 29.9% earn between $120,000 and $200,000.
Even those earning $500k to $1 million are more than the two lowest earning brackets combined, coming in at 8.2%. This shows that MSP employees are well-paid in the US, and their salaries far exceed the average wage.
Overall, Disaster Recovery as a Service is emerging as a vital solution for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) across the United States in 2024. With natural disasters, cyberattacks, and power outages on the rise, MSPs are prioritizing robust disaster recovery strategies to safeguard their clients’ operations.
Despite this focus, challenges such as disaster recovery planning and staff training pose challenges. These highlight the complexity of delivering effective DRaaS solutions and the need for continuous investment in technology, expertise, and client education. MSPs that can do so will thrive in this competitive environment.
About the data
Sourced from an independent sample of 72,506 people working for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) from X, Bluesky, Quora, Reddit, TikTok and Threads. Responses are collected within an 80% confidence interval and a 5% margin of error. Engagement estimates how many people in the location are participating. Demographics are determined using many features, including name, location and self-disclosed description. Privacy is preserved using k-anonymity and differential privacy. Results are based on what people describe online — questions were not posed to the people in the sample.
