Office 365 Isn’t Going Anywhere – But Your Clients’ Data Might

Both Google Drive and Box have recently announced integrations with Microsoft Office applications, saving your users time and increasing their productivity while collaborating with others, or when taking their work on the road. The upshot of these moves is clear: by letting people store their documents in whichever cloud repository they want, Microsoft will ensure consumers continue using their productivity suite while nurturing potential subscription buyers of Office 365.

Smart move, Microsoft. But where do partners fit into all of this?

Microsoft Office 365, including the Office productivity suite, is the elephant in the room. For $5.00 per user per month businesses can subscribe to Office 365, including Office, Exchange, Lync, and OneDrive, with generous amounts of storage – an enticing bundle for many small- and medium-sized businesses. In this environment, partners need to evolve and figure out new ways to add value, since clients are moving away from on-premises applications that need to be deployed and managed.

One way is for partners to deliver cloud-to-cloud backup and prevent data loss from happening in the cloud. In the cloud, user error is the most common source of data loss, and partners can add value to these applications by backing up client data to eliminate the risks and costs associated with data loss, whether it is malicious and accidental.

In addition, a solution that enables cloud-to-cloud migrations, user account restores, instant cross-service search, and rapid granular restore for SaaS applications is a comprehensive and profitable value-add for partners.

Cloudfinder, offered to channel partners by eFolder, gives end users the assurance that their cloud data is backed up, protected, and recoverable. Cloudfinder works across Office 365, Google Apps, Salesforce, and Box. Most importantly, Cloudfinder is competitively priced so that partners can unlock margins.