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disaster_planningIf disaster struck today, how would your customers fare?

While this is an important question to ask yourself throughout the year, it’s especially relevant today as we kick off National Preparedness Month. In an initiative sponsored by FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security, each September, National Preparedness Month encourages us to spend some time dedicating ourselves to being better equipped to manage through emergencies and disasters. The goal is to raise awareness of the need for preparedness and to encourage proactive disaster planning.

An opportunity for service providers

So, this is a natural time to reach out to your customers and prospects to provide added value. After all, part of being a trusted advisor means always looking out for your customers’ best interests, and helping them mitigate the risk they face in the wake of a disaster certainly falls within the scope of that.

We all know that disasters don’t discriminate when choosing when and where to strike, so all businesses are vulnerable. But, there are things you can bring to their attention to help them prepare for disruptions, whether it’s a short downtime or a worst case scenario.

Five things your customers need to know

  1. When a disaster strikes, the odds are not in their favor. Statistically, almost one-third of businesses will be affected by some sort of natural disaster. Perhaps even more gripping, according to FEMA, 25 percent of businesses do not re-open after a natural disaster, and 43 percent do not re-open after catastrophic data loss.
  2. How much downtime they can afford. A study by Aberdeen concluded that the average cost of downtime for a business was approximately $163,674 per hour. While this is a staggering number for a business of any size, your SMB customers may be particularly sensitive to hearing these costs. Investing in preparedness now and understanding the value of time will undoubtedly save them in the long run.
  3. What they need to backup. Businesses should plan to backup any files and applications required to help them operate their business. This means line of business applications, emails, client records, virtual machines, point of sale systems, financial and accounting applications, CRM software instances, servers and workstations, and their general files and folders. Try sharing this infographic to communicate the importance of comprehensive backups to your prospects. (A white-label version is available to Intronis Partners when logged into the Partner Toolkit.)
  4. They need a DR plan. And the right tools to support it. A disaster recovery plan is an essential set of procedures documented to protect an organization’s IT infrastructure after a disruption, such as a power failure, system crash, natural disaster, or human error. The impact of some of these disruptions, such as human error, can be minimized with preemptive backup and recovery planning, but others are out of your control. Your customers need to plan for scenarios where their only course of action is to use corrective disaster recovery methods to recover an entire IT infrastructure after a major disaster has occurred. When you combine proper planning with the use of a cloud-based BCDR solution like the one Intronis provides, you will be well on your way to ensuring that none of your customers will close their doors due to data loss
  5. A plan that is not tested often fails. A critical piece of DR planning is making sure that a plan works in practice. Work with your customers to educate employees on their involvement in the plan, and make sure hold a dry run. After the practice run, you and the customer’s team should come together to share input on areas where confusion was uncovered or how the process could be improved, incorporate that into the plan, and test it again.

Tools for Partners

We hope you will begin communicating the importance of preparedness to your customers and prospects today. Don’t forget to leverage the tools available in the Intronis Partner Toolkit such as the Disaster Recovery Event in a Box, rebrandable data loss email campaigns, and success story templates to help support your conversations.

Photo Credit: North Charelston on Flickr. Used under CC 2.0 license. 

 


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Lindsay Faria

Posted by Lindsay Faria

As Director of MSP Marketing, Americas, at Barracuda, Lindsay Faria is dedicated to empowering Barracuda MSP partners to grow their businesses by providing tools and information to make marketing and selling their data protection services as effective, fast and easy as possible.

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