Meeting The BDR Need With Your Business Continuity Solution

By Continuum

You cannot claim to be a solutions provider unless you offer all of the obvious necessities to your potential business clients. Part of your role as a managed IT services provider is to help each client find the best solution(s) for their business — solutions that will save them time, save them money, and help them meet desired business outcomes, such as increased profitability, optimized employee productivity, and a more streamlined technology spend.

Business Continuity Is Fundamental

For every one of your clients, business continuity is a fundamental part of their business. Small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) today rely on data and information in their daily operations. Indeed, technology has become so interwoven into our regular business processes that we require always-on capability and constant uptime to maintain employee productivity. Without this, organizations face margin-reducing inefficiency. By helping clients ensure continuity and avoid these potentially business-crippling consequences, you’re delivering invaluable peace of mind.

You’d probably agree that, in today’s technology-based world, data is the most valuable asset in any business. But, inevitably, things go wrong. Computer equipment fails. People make mistakes. Natural disasters can happen anywhere, at any time. No business can afford to assume all is well, so protecting data and systems becomes a top priority. Help your clients with their disaster readiness.

By adopting data backup software, small businesses are taking the first step. But, all too often, they make the mistake of assuming they’ve completely solved their problem. Unfortunately, data backup software is also vulnerable to failures. Redundancy and testing are the only ways to ensure data is being backed up successfully, and this is something that most small business owners simply do not know how to do. And to close the loop, that data must be quickly recoverable if a loss occurs.

Delivering Backup And Disaster Recovery Services

Offering BDR services involves having the necessary technical support in place to perform these time-consuming, low revenue tasks like regularly testing backup systems and troubleshooting backup failures. It’s not enough to simply sell the data backup software. You need a reliable, 24x7x365 team of experts available to manage your BDR service levels for all clients. Detail how these services will be overseen when presenting your business continuity offering. BDR combines backup and disaster recovery in a single, integrated solution. It’s not only a matter of storing data in a secure environment and restoring it quickly. It’s about system recovery, if needed. Explain how you’ll staff and meet client expectations for this fundamental aspect of BDR service delivery in your conversations with prospects.

SMBs cannot do without BDR, but this isn’t always clear to the prospects you pitch. They may take for granted all of the precise planning and maintenance required, but you should expect this initial hesitancy. When talking about business continuity to prospects, it is your job to educate them on the value of a fully-managed solution that enables the always on business continuity demanded, without forcing them to endure tedious grunt work or incur associated costs.

Continuity247™ Is The Ideal BDR Platform

Continuum’s Continuity247 platform is a smart technology and business management choice for growing MSPs that want to be seen as true solutions providers. Data is stored on a local appliance and replicated offsite to the cloud. Using IBM’s Cloud infrastructure, data is replicated to multiple U.S.-based data centers, protecting clients against losses generated by users, malware or natural disasters. In the case of a major disaster, Continuum’s Network Operations Center (NOC) will spin up your complete site as virtual machines on a private network in the cloud, with VPN access for you and your clients. With minimal downtime, business operations can continue as usual.

BDR must be managed, just like any other service. An SMB could easily purchase a cloud-based storage plan on their own. But then they’re saddled with having to internally handle 24/7 backup monitoring and verification, overall continuity planning and, of course, actual data recovery should a loss occur. Most SMBs aren’t equipped to do all that, and they don’t want to.

As an MSP, you can offer a more effective — and cost-effective — business management option.

Small businesses succeed by focusing on what they do best and partnering with subject matter and functional experts to augment the areas in which they need help. In the case of MSPs, this includes delivering comprehensive solutions that include BDR. Your value proposition is obvious — you can provide peace of mind at a reasonable cost, especially compared to the unthinkable cost of catastrophic data loss. Or the cost of annoying employees and customers with minor failures.

Testing Is Essential

Backups are a waste of time if you can’t restore the data in a timely manner. Yet, the 2016 Disaster Recovery as a Service Attitude and Adoption Report noted 22 percent of participants test their DR plans only once a year, or never at all. As an MSP, this illustrates a clear opportunity to educate customers about this missing link in their business continuity protection.

In order to provide for the long-term preservation of data, a technical support team must regularly test and verify that backups are configured properly. Otherwise, businesses will be restricted to the data generated and changes captured during the last successful backup, which could be months old. If you’re leveraging Continity247, however, we help you meet optimal recovery point objectives (RPOs), offering backup testing and true, end-to-end BDR management of all your clients’ endpoints.

Both You And Your Clients Will Benefit

Becoming a true solutions provider can boost your bottom line. Gartner predicts the BDR market will reach $7 billion by 2019, up from $5.2 billion in 2014. The fastest-growing segment? Disaster Recovery as a Service. To get the most from your investment in this offering, however, you’ll need a fully-managed solution like Continuity247. You’ll get lower total cost of ownership, thanks in large part to integrated NOC and Help Desk support, and it’s designed to grow with you as your client-base grows.

To introduce BDR to prospects:

1. Emphasize what’s in it for them. Few small business owners care about the technical details, they simply want reliable data access.
2. Conduct a thorough risk assessment for their company to identify and prioritize likely vulnerabilities, then identify target recovery times and point objectives.
3. Develop tailored, reasonable SLAs. Specific benchmarks replace vague reassurances with clear expectations, adding value and building trust with customers.
4. Help them calculate their costs of downtime, tangible and intangible — lost revenue, lost productivity, cost to recover, reputation damage, lost sales and/or customers. You may be surprised how many SMBs have never considered this. It’s another opportunity to demonstrate immediate value to prospects, by helping them understand this critical business cost. While offering them a comprehensive, cost-effective solution.

Learn More

Your value as an MSP depends on delivering a comprehensive solution, including backup and disaster recovery. What should you look for in a BDR solution? What does it take to effectively manage a BDR solution? And how can you turn BDR into a business-builder for your MSP firm? Find out all that and more in The MSP’s Guide to Backup and Disaster Recovery.