For years, the storage business had been reasonably stable. Primary storage was local and backed-up data were nearby or at remote sites along with archived data. Production files were rapidly accessible, and governance and compliance demands were more or less met. The choices were finite and life was, for the most part, relatively orderly.

But things change over time. Clouds changed the economics of storage from a capital expense to an operating cost. They offer repositories that are less expensive than do-it-yourself solutions and are virtually infinite in capacity. Moreover, there are now public and private clouds to choose from and the advent of object storage delivers a metadata-based file system that is ideal for stashing billions or even trillions of files.Add to this software-defined storage (SDS), which abstracts storage from the underlying hardware. SDS offers control and scalability but requires expertise to deploy effectively. Throw in solid-state and in-memory storage, which can greatly enhance the performance of storage systems, as well as the rise of containers, and the storage business has become a vexing mélange of technologies and options.Which is fertile ground for MSPs. Rather than acquire new layers of IT know-how, enterprises of all sizes and in all verticals can turn to MSPs to navigate the new world of storage. MSPs can manage services in both the data center and cloud to meet the needs for primary, backup, and archival storage cost-effectively.Opportunistic MSPs can assess organizations’ demands for performance and scalability, and oversee migrations of data to public or private clouds. They can ensure that security, compliance, and governance needs are always met, and implement disaster recovery strategies that satisfy each client’s business mandates. Moreover, MSPs can leverage hardware resources by using virtualization to consolidate multiple resources into a single, cost-efficient cloud offering.By offering storage as a service, MSPs can find that change and upheaval present business opportunities.