Introduction

Cloud backup isn’t what it used to be. Five years ago, moving your clients’ data to the cloud was the innovative move. Today, it’s table stakes. The real question MSPs and resellers are facing now is more complex: which cloud, how many clouds, and what stays on-premises?

If you’re still offering single-provider cloud backup as your primary solution, you’re probably hearing new objections from clients. They want options. They need compliance flexibility. They’re worried about putting all their eggs in one basket, especially after seeing headlines about major cloud outages affecting businesses for hours or even days.

This is where hybrid and multi-cloud backup strategies come in. Hybrid means combining on-premises infrastructure with cloud storage. Multi-cloud means using multiple cloud providers rather than committing to just one. Often, the most robust approach uses both concepts together.

Why Clients Are Demanding More

The landscape changed dramatically in 2025. Between August 2024 and August 2025, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud together experienced more than 100 service outages, with some lasting several hours. One particularly notable incident saw AWS services go down for 15 hours in October, affecting millions of users and over 1,000 companies.

Your clients are reading these headlines too. They’re asking themselves: what happens to our business if our single cloud provider goes down for 15 hours?

Beyond outage concerns, several other factors are pushing businesses toward hybrid and multi-cloud strategies:

Vendor Lock-In Fears: Nobody wants to be at the mercy of a single provider’s pricing decisions or policy changes. 92% of organizations now operate in hybrid or multi-cloud environments, and this shift represents businesses taking control of their infrastructure destiny.

Compliance Requirements: Different regulations demand different things. GDPR in Europe, HIPAA in healthcare, state-level privacy laws in the US. Some clients need data physically stored in specific geographic regions. A single-cloud approach often can’t meet all these requirements simultaneously.

Cost Optimization: Not all data needs the same level of protection or accessibility. Recent backups might need to be instantly available, while older archives can live in cheaper cold storage. Different cloud providers offer different pricing tiers, and savvy businesses want to take advantage of the best deals across multiple platforms.

The numbers tell the story. The cloud backup market is experiencing explosive growth, projected to grow from $4.9 billion in 2024 to $24.4 billion by 2032. MSPs who position themselves as experts in hybrid and multi-cloud strategies are positioning themselves to capture a larger share of this expanding market.

Real Benefits for MSPs and Their Clients

When you offer hybrid and multi-cloud backup strategies, you’re delivering tangible value that directly impacts your clients’ bottom line and your own competitive position.

Superior Data Resilience: The math is simple. If one backup location fails, you have others. With geo-redundant backups across multiple providers or locations, you’re building true resilience. When that AWS outage happens, your client’s critical systems can failover to Azure backups within minutes instead of waiting helplessly for 15 hours.

Faster Recovery Times: Here’s where on-premises backup shines in a hybrid model. For recently deleted files or corrupted databases, pulling from a local backup server takes minutes instead of hours. You get the speed of local recovery with the safety net of cloud archives.

Regulatory Compliance Made Easier: Different industries face different compliance requirements, and hybrid multi-cloud strategies give you the flexibility to meet them all. Need healthcare data to stay in HIPAA-compliant US data centers? Done. Need European customer data to remain in EU regions for GDPR? No problem.

Competitive Differentiation: Most MSPs are still offering basic single-cloud backup. When you walk into a prospect meeting and explain how your hybrid multi-cloud approach protected another client during last year’s major outages, you’re speaking a language that resonates with decision-makers who are tired of hearing about cloud failures.

New Revenue Opportunities: Sophisticated backup strategies command premium pricing. You can build tiered service offerings: bronze for single-cloud, silver for hybrid, gold for multi-cloud with active-active failover. Different clients have different risk tolerances and budgets.

The Challenges (And How to Handle Them)

Let’s be honest: managing backups across multiple environments is more complex than pointing everything at a single cloud provider. But the challenges aren’t insurmountable.

Management Complexity: The answer is finding a backup platform with true multi-cloud support and a unified management interface. You shouldn’t need to log into three different consoles to verify that last night’s backups completed successfully. Look for solutions that give you a single pane of glass for all your backup infrastructure. Automation is your friend here.

Cost Considerations: The key is intelligent data placement. Hot data that needs fast recovery goes on-premises or to premium cloud storage. Warm data goes to standard cloud tiers. Cold archive data goes to the cheapest long-term storage you can find. And remember: the cost of a 15-hour outage usually exceeds years of multi-cloud backup expenses.

Security and Access Control: Use centralized identity management systems that federate across all your backup destinations. Implement encryption at rest and in transit everywhere, no exceptions. Use role-based access control with the principle of least privilege.

Data Transfer and Bandwidth: This is where hybrid architectures really shine. Back up to on-premises storage first for speed, then replicate to the cloud during off-hours. Use incremental forever backups to minimize data transfer volumes.

The reality? These challenges are why many MSPs haven’t made the move to hybrid multi-cloud yet. That’s your opportunity. The ones who figure this out first will capture market share from the ones still trying to sell single-cloud solutions in a multi-cloud world.

Getting Started: Practical Implementation

You don’t need to flip a switch and move all your clients to hybrid multi-cloud overnight. Here’s how to approach this strategically.

Start with Assessment: Not every client needs the full hybrid multi-cloud treatment. Create a simple risk assessment framework: how much does downtime cost this client per hour? What are their compliance requirements? How much data do they have? Use these answers to prioritize which clients to migrate first.

Pick the Right Platform: This is the most important decision you’ll make. Your backup solution needs to natively support all the environments you plan to use. Look for automated policy enforcement across all destinations. Make sure it supports the operating systems and applications your clients run. Check that it offers the recovery features you need, like instant recovery, granular restore, and automated testing.

Start Small and Prove Value: Pick a few pilot clients who understand the benefits and are willing to work through any rough edges. Document everything you learn. Run actual recovery tests to prove the solution works. Then use those success stories to sell the approach to other clients.

Build Runbooks and Processes: Create step-by-step runbooks for common tasks: adding a new backup client, modifying retention policies, performing restores from each environment, troubleshooting backup failures. Document your naming conventions and organizational structure.

Price It Right: Your hybrid multi-cloud backup service is more sophisticated than basic backup. Price it accordingly. Consider tiered pricing based on recovery time objectives, number of backup destinations, frequency of backups, and amount of data.

What MSPs Should Look for in a Backup Solution

The platform you choose makes or breaks your hybrid multi-cloud strategy. Here are the non-negotiables:

• Native Multi-Cloud Support: One solution that treats all environments as first-class citizens with feature parity across all of them
• Unified Management: A single dashboard where you see all backups across all environments
• Automation Everywhere: Policy-driven backup that enforces your rules consistently across all destinations
• Flexible Recovery Options: Instant recovery, granular file-level restore, application-aware backups, cross-platform recovery
• Strong Security: End-to-end encryption, immutable backups, multi-factor authentication, audit logging
• White-Label Capabilities: For resellers, the ability to brand the solution as your own
• Quality Support: 24/7 responsive vendor support, not just business hours

Conclusion

The future of cloud backup is clear: it’s hybrid and multi-cloud. With organizations experiencing over 100 major outages in a single year from just the top three providers, and with 92% of organizations operating hybrid or multi-cloud environments, the question isn’t whether to adopt these strategies, but how quickly you can get there.

For MSPs and resellers, this represents both a challenge and an opportunity. Yes, hybrid multi-cloud backup is more complex than single-cloud solutions. But that complexity is also a moat that protects you from competitors who aren’t willing to invest in understanding these architectures.

The market is growing fast. The technology is maturing. Client demand is increasing. The MSPs who establish expertise in hybrid and multi-cloud backup now will be the ones capturing premium business for years to come.

Start with one pilot client. Choose a backup platform that supports your target environments. Build the processes and documentation you need. Prove the value. Then scale.

At BE In The Cloud, we specialize in helping MSPs and resellers navigate exactly these challenges. Whether you’re just starting to explore hybrid multi-cloud backup or you’re ready to transform your entire backup service offering, we have the expertise and platform capabilities to make it happen.

Ready to evolve your backup strategy? Contact us to discuss how BE In The Cloud can help you implement hybrid and multi-cloud backup solutions that set you apart from the competition and deliver real protection to your clients.