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We all know that bad stuff can happen to good clients. It could involve a massive weather event closing down offices, or perhaps a cyber security incident that takes down a network. Perhaps there could even be war or political upheaval keeping the business from operating from its normal location.

Regardless of the reason, your job as MSP is to keep the lights on for your clients. Yet sometimes due to extenuating circumstances that isn’t possible, even when you use reputable cloud vendors, whose job is to adhere to an SLA and keep your clients going by ensuring redundancy across the system.

That might actually be fine if your computing choices were with a single vendor, but what happens when you spread your client’s eggs across multiple cloud baskets, as many MSPs do? How do you ensure that they can all keep running in the event of that worst case scenario?

The answer lies in disaster recovery tools, which provide continuous backup along with the requisite redundancy, and it backs up wherever your data lives instead of relying on individual vendors to shoulder the responsibility. Should the worst case happen and your client’s office is shuttered, they can set up in a new location, recover the backup, and be ready to go in short order.

Insuring against worst cases

How long it will take to get going again depends on how large the company is and how much data we are talking about, but it’s certainly better to have this insurance policy in place than not.

One of the tricky aspects of this is deciding which data to back up. If you backup everything, it could get expensive, but you don’t want to be left flat-footed either in the event of a mishap. So you have to work with your clients and decide what their appetite here is for cost versus benefit. It’s not unlike any type of insurance. You have to weigh your needs should something happen against the cost of the products.

Should that disaster happen, you can at least be assured that the most critical data you need to run the company, whatever that happens to be, has been protected and that you can access it when that moment happens.

To illustrate the importance of this capability, Amazon recently acquired CloudEndure, an Israeli disaster recovery startup, for around $200 million. The purchase illustrates the growing importance of this type of service, even to a large cloud infrastructure services provider like AWS.

Disaster recovery is about breaking the glass in case of emergency. You hope you never have to use it, but it’s nice to know you have the mechanisms in place to get your client going again should that disaster strike.

Photo by Comfreak on Pixbay. Used under Pixabay license.


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Ron Miller

Posted by Ron Miller

Ron Miller is a freelance technology reporter and blogger. He is contributing editor at EContent Magazine and enterprise reporter at TechCrunch.

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