At some point, every organization’s data will be compromised. Whether from malicious actors, careless employees, natural forces or technical failures, it’s inevitable in today’s IT environment. But even though managed service providers (MSPs) can’t control the attacks on their clients’ data, they can control the level of protection offered. That’s where backup and disaster recovery (BDR) comes in.
Both in-house and outsourced IT teams traditionally spend a significant number of hours on the maintenance and monitoring that BDR requires, which takes away from their ability to add strategic business value—a critical factor in scaling business amidst constant, rapid transformation. The fact is, BDR can’t be compromised. For MSPs in particular, BDR is a key component of earning and sustaining clients’ trust.
So how can an MSP’s BDR become a profit-boosting part of their business strategy? Here are four tactics to use your BDR as a growth engine and drive more business for your MSP.
1. Make Built-in BDR Mandatory
With built-in BDR, it’s never an optional add-on. You are guaranteed top-quality backup and disaster recovery. At this point, your small-to-medium-sized business (SMB) clients are aware of their high risk to ransomware threats. So BDR IS like insurance: clients don’t want to pay for it, but they understand that they have to.
If the client already has a year’s subscription to another one-off BDR product, you can sell them on your built-in BDR by mentioning that it will cost them more if to monitor another backup solution in addition, plus your solution is very likely more comprehensive.
2. Integrate Your Services
Instead of offering service levels, go “all you can eat” with a single packaged offering. Keep in mind that clients want the best service they can get for the least money—and with multiple service tiers, that means that they want to buy the least expensive option but expect the same level of service as the top tier.
When you offer your services as one integrated suite, you can avoid one-by-one selling points and instead focus on your overall value proposition: offering your clients complete data protection.
3. Set Realistic Expectations
Setting expectations that are clearly communicated and understood by your client plays a key role in delivering successful BDR services. So, standardize your recovery services as much as possible. It's important to define a number that you’re certain you can hit, and that provides the least possible disruption to your clients.
The one thing that does vary from deployment to deployment is the capacity of the storage equipment on-premises for each client. It’s crucial to ensure that the horsepower and data capacity you provide can keep pace with your promises around recovery.
4. Outsource Mundane Work
Let’s face it: backup and disaster recovery can be tedious. Not only is it mundane work for your employees, but it takes up valuable time that should be devoted to high-value tasks and initiatives. Using too many of your engineers to maintain, monitor, and repair backups is cost-prohibitive and prevents top staff from being the “feet on the street” that customers expect.
Luckily, you can balance the necessity of BDR with its time-intensive requirements by outsourcing much of the manual work to a Network Operations Center, or NOC that can manage the thousands of alerts you receive—or miss—daily. This can make a huge difference in your ability to deliver the best quality services to clients. Ultimately, outsourcing BDR and other mundane tasks will help you focus on modernizing and expanding your own business.
With Continuum Recover, you can ensure operations run smoothly no matter what challenges arise, while simultaneously reducing administrative overhead. Watch a demo to learn more!
Guest blog courtesy of Continuum. Read more Continuum guest blogs here.
