Are Your Customers Mistaking Cloud Storage For Cloud Backup?

By The Business Solutions Network

In my recent blog posts, I've been focusing a lot on selling cloud services, and more specifically, how to overcome objections to selling cloud services. So far, I've touched upon the security differences between cloud services, and more recently, I talked about overcoming price objections.

The other day I discovered another obstacle you may face with your cloud services offering. This falls into the category of comparing "apples to apples."

DropBox, Google Drive, and Microsoft SkyDrive are examples of cloud storage options that provide consumers and businesses with very inexpensive storage, making it easy to share documents, photos, and other media. Doyenz, TOGL, and KineticD are examples of  cloud backup options. Did you catch that subtle difference? Cloud backup entails quickly restoring your customers' IT operations following a failed on-premise restore or when recovering from a natural disaster. In fact, depending on how quickly the customer needs to get back up and running, this level of service can be built into an SLA (service level agreement) whereby you, the cloud backup provider, and the customer have the same understanding regarding the details of how the customer's data and IT systems will be restored.

A provider of cloud storage, on the other hand, is not set up to provide this level of  business continuity service. If having a true disaster recovery solution in place is important to your customer, make sure to emphasize these points when you're helping them justify why they need to invest in your cloud offering.