MSPs once talked about business continuity and disaster recovery until we were blue in the face. Whether the topic bored clients, the market grew disinterested, or we simply grew tired of repeating ourselves, the conversation has fallen off in recent years – much to the detriment of MSP clients.
When cloud technology emerged, it was touted for enhancing resilience, reducing the risks associated with hardware failures, and promising a whole new landscape of backup and data restoration capabilities. Unfortunately, there’s now a false sense of security: Users believe that because their data is in the cloud, it must be safe.
Assumption, misunderstanding, and reactivity run rampant where innovation and education should lead. It’s time to revisit continuity and recovery with a new and improved understanding of risk and tolerance.
Eliminate assumptions: clients don’t know what they don’t know
Data loss isn’t top of mind anymore, and it’s safe to assume clients aren’t poring over the different types of disasters they may face – weather events, natural disasters, cyberattacks and data breaches, outages, and so on.
Clients often make an undue assumption: that vendors and MSPs have got data and backup under control…but what does that really mean?
Clients assume that by using a reputable vendor, they’re guaranteed appropriate data storage, backup, and recovery. The details of what safeguards are in place, what backups are being conducted, the age of the data protected, and other critical details aren’t even being considered. Often, the assumptions clients are making exceed the offerings of their vendors.
The impact of poor continuity and disaster recovery
Clients may not realize how critical disaster recovery can be, or how vulnerable they are to disasters in the first place.
For example, let’s say a data center malfunction interrupts your client’s email, calendar, and document storage services. The client waits hours or days for restoration, paying associated costs, only to then find out that their cloud vendor has only backed up the client’s data every 12, 24, or more hours. Now, the client has lost hours of business and critical data that they assumed was continuously saved – and they’re furious at you, the MSP, for not mitigating these risks.
This example highlights the risks caused by improper business continuity and disaster recovery strategies, which include:
- Monetary cost due to lost business hours
- Poor client experiences and reputational damage
- Loss of critical data or system information
- Potential legal, ethical, or compliance consequences
- And more
Ask the right questions for your clients
As an MSP, it’s our duty to break down these details for clients and ensure their risk tolerance reflects their continuity and recovery capabilities – or risk damaging the client relationship and our own reputation.
That begins with proactively asking the right questions to eliminate assumptions and risk.
Clients need to understand what, exactly, their vendors are doing to prevent data loss, including:
- RTO: How long would it take to restore systems and data in an outage?
- RPO: How much data is being backed up, and how frequently do backups occur?
- Scope: How much of the recovery process do vendors own, and how much falls on the company or MSP?
Don’t play the blame game
When disaster strikes, stakeholders and leadership look for the point of failure. It may fall on the shoulders of the MSP, should they fail to warn and educate the client about risks and potential losses.
Getting ahead with a proactive approach helps protect your business and your clients, and challenges the notion of MSPs as a “break-fix” relationship. Instead, we position ourselves as the strategic partner worth investing in.
Beyond planning ahead – the critical role of practice
Clients require a robust disaster recovery plan… and we know most don’t have one, let alone practice the methodology.
Plan vs. method and where DR plans fail
A well-outlined and detailed disaster recovery plan includes methodology, steps, and actionable information. Most critically, the plan requires practice.
MSPs should conduct tabletop exercises with clients, diving deeply into details like points of contact and their contact information, roles and responsibilities, and the realities of how disasters play out. Without immersive practice, clients don’t know what to expect – and only in hindsight do they see what the plan was missing.
Looking ahead: Let’s revisit continuity and recovery as experts
Today, MSPs have the unique opportunity to get ahead of the new risks posed by the AI boom and the growing dissatisfaction with backup solutions. This gives MSPs the chance to act as a strategic guide, helping choose a cost-effective solution for the client’s business case and ensuring the system’s security and the data it protects.
By leading clients forward with a renewed focus on business continuity and disaster recovery, MSPs solidify their value in clients’ eyes and position themselves firmly as a trusted, strategic partner for the long term.
