Backups are very important to any business, and MSPs need to keep ensuring proper backups as a Number One priority. Early in my IT career, I made a mistake that caused massive data loss at a company. The backups hadn't been functional for the six months prior to the incident, which was also my fault as the person who should have been checking. The cost to repair the damage was over $11,000. From that moment on, to say that I'm a stickler for making sure backups are functioning would be a huge understatement.
As I learned, it is not enough to just look and see if backups are running. Regular restoration checks should be performed as part of a disaster recovery plan to make sure the data being backed up is being stored properly.
File and data restoration should not be limited to only being performed by IT staff. One way to significantly reduce calls to the service desk is to put the power of restoration in the user's hands. I cannot even count how many tickets I received in my help desk days to assist a user in restoring a file they have deleted/saved over/or otherwise messed up. While these service requests were generally quick and easy to perform, I could have been working on resolving tickets that were more complicated.
Asigra Partner Program
There are many companies that provide backup and restoration services. It can be hard for MSPs to select the best one for their business and for their clients. Asigra, which provides agentless cloud-based recovery software, has announced new financial incentives that they hope will empower partners to grow their share of the cloud backup market.
The new Partner Acceleration Program from Asigra claims to enable end-customers to reduce their cost of backup and recovery by 50% of what they are paying currently. The program also allows partners to select a preferred software licensing model to fit their business and encourage customer adoption. The company states that under the Asigra program, customers are not limited to a single pricing model but can select from capacity-based subscription, per-machine, per mailbox, per CPU socket, or recovery-based pricing.
In a prepared statement Eran Farajun, executive VP, Asigra said “With backup and recovery projected to receive a substantial share of the managed services budget in 2018, MSPs need an edge to become an IT services leader. Asigra’s new program reduces the resistance to switching BU/DR platforms to one that has been industry-proven for 30 years and delivers a tremendous pricing advantage over every solution on the market.”
Asigra currently provides data backup and recovery of servers, virtual machines, endpoint devices, databases and applications, SaaS and IaaS based applications, and allows users from around the world the ability to recover their data now from anywhere. Asigra claims to lower the total cost of ownership, reduce recovery time objectives, eliminate silos of backup data by providing a single consolidated repository, and provide 100% recovery assurance.
