Colocation and hosting managed service providers (MSPs) are under extreme pressure these days. Commoditization has driven margins down, causing considerable jockeying for position as MSPs try to differentiate themselves in an increasingly saturated market.
Expedient, a regional U.S. cloud hosting provider and longtime Juniper customer, is bucking that trend. The Pittsburgh-based firm is experiencing a virtual business renaissance based on a new Disaster Recovery as-a-Service (DRaaS) offering to its customers that it has cleverly named Push Button DR.
This managed service has three key components 1) Hosted dedicated Juniper vSRX virtual firewalls, 2) virtual servers hosted on VMware and 3) VMware Site Recovery manager (SAN to SAN). What do these three components add up to? Enhanced security for Expedient customers—and greater profits for Expedient. 
It also places Expedient in a very sweet spot in the rapidly expanding DRaaS space. According to Markets and Markets, global DRaaS and cloud-based business continuity is forecasted to grow from $640.8 million in 2013 to $5.77 billion by 2018, at a compound annual growth rate of 55 percent.
Those are impressive numbers. Expedient isn’t letting any grass grow under its feet pursuing them. One of the things that virtualization in general and vSRX in particular make possible is bringing very sophisticated DR capabilities to a whole new class of customers. Previously, only the largest and most well-heeled organizations could afford the type of protection and convenience that Push Button DR delivers. Now new markets are beckoning for Expedient, as Juniper vSRX helps make DRaaS affordable for even the smallest mom-and-pop shops.
Expect to see a lot of talk among MSPs about this in coming months. Currently, just 24 percent of small and medium-size businesses—the chief targets for Push Button DR—are using cloud-based DR, according to a 2013 survey by Spiceworks. This segment has a lot of legs. And using Juniper’s vSRX has opened up a broad spectrum of possible new value-added services that Expedient can offer its customers.
Even as Expedient signs up new DRaaS customers, it is migrating existing DR customers to the vSRX-based service. Furthermore Expedient and Juniper are currently putting their heads together to push the boundaries of scalability and performance that a virtual security device like vSRX makes possible. We’re talking security services that span multiple hypervisors as well as are capable of much higher speed throughput.
My prediction: Expedient will go from success to success if it continues to debut services like Push Button DR. The world is already taking notice. According to an independent study by Cloud Spectator, Expedient outperformed all other cloud providers in 2014, offering up to 53 times the value of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Those are numbers you can believe in as we look forward to a future that’s increasingly cloudy and enormously bright.
Read the entire case study https://www.juniper.net/us/en/company/case-studies/service-provider/expedient/