MSP Business
10 ways Cloud Backup enhances the MSP
30 April, 2014
Your team has their hands on every physical and virtual server, workstation, application, service and device at a given customer site, providing what I call the “three Ms” of the MSP business – Monitoring, Management and Maintenance.
The Maintenance includes things like backup. Probably old, slow, cumbersome tape-based backups, or if you’re smart, at least disk-based backups.
But both of these options has a problem – they are completely on-site. In a natural disaster, chemical spill, or even breaking of water pipes in the building, your local backup solution will face the same fate as your customer’s data and systems. You can always take tapes or disks offsite, but isn’t there a better way?
Cloud Backups provide the fastest and most reliable way to backup customer data. It’s best implemented in a Hybrid model – one where a local disk-based backup exists that is archived to the Cloud. This is also known as disk-to-disk-to-cloud (D2D2C) backups.
So, how can Cloud Backups improve your service offering to your customers and the bottom line for you both? Let’s start with just 10 ways you can enhance your business with Cloud Backups.
- Aligns with Customer Expectations – the customer is counting on you to not only get everything running, but also keep it running. Cloud Backup is an obvious add-on service that fits right into your wheelhouse keeping the customer’s systems and data available.
- Improves the Trust in Your Relationship – Putting the customer’s data and systems into the cloud can be a concern. But by recommending the right provider with features like 448 Blowfish encryption (where only the customer has the private key to decrypt), you demonstrate you have the customer’s best interests at heart and increase your credibility as a trusted advisor.
- Increases Backup Availability – The hybrid implementation of Cloud Backup provides you with the highest level of backup redundancy and availability. If the Internet is down, you have your local disk-based backups. You’re never without a backup and no more tapes!
- Creates Unlimited Backup Capacity – Because the storage is in the cloud, you can easily increase how much you need without the worry of adding servers, disks, etc.Â
- Helps to Meet Uptime SLAs – You’ve put a lot of work into setting up the customer just right so that they operate efficiently. Providing them (and yourself) a way to quickly get anything from a file to an entire server back up and running only reaffirms and solidifies your relationship with the customer.
- Creates Recurring Revenue Streams – You can charge the customer a monthly fee for the service (usually based on a per/GB model) which can increase as you add on servers to your data backups and workstations to your server backups.
- Creates Service Revenue – Someone’s going to need to establish a new recovery plan (hint – it’s you!), as well as periodically test out both the local and cloud-based restores.
- Speeds up Backups – Cloud Backups usually work at the block level, so only the changed blocks of data are copied, which keeps the amount of data being transmitted over the Internet to a minimum and speeds up backup times.
- Speeds up Restores – The obvious downside of Cloud Backup is your restore is only as fast as your Internet connection. That’s where Hybrid implementations shine. Restores can be quickly performed, even when the Internet is down.Â
- Zero Loss of Data – A Hybrid implementation also creates an additional layer of redundancy with both a local and Cloud-based copy of the customer’s more valuable assets.
It’s clearly evident that Cloud Backup can enhance your business – what’s keeping you from offering it today?
We’ve probably missed a few ways Cloud Backup and Recovery benefits an MSP. Leave us a comment and tell us what benefits we forgot!
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