Is Backup Wasting Your Time and Costing You Money?

There’s an old adage that “time is money,” and nowhere is this truer than in the world of managed IT service providers. When you sell professional services and expertise, every wasted minute is a lost revenue opportunity.

How many hours are you wasting on a needlessly complex backup setup? Here are some things to consider:

• Opening and launching interfaces for multiple backup products across customers or data sources: If you spend 15 minutes a day launching and logging in to multiple products to check backup status, it adds up to 75 minutes to your work week.
• Identifying backups that have failed or completed with errors: If you spend 30 minutes a day scrolling through lists of backup jobs across multiple interfaces, that’s 150 minutes per week.
• Troubleshooting: Once you’ve identified backup jobs with issues, how much time does it take to drill down and cross-reference to find and solve the causes? If this takes another hour per day, you’re looking at five hours per week.
• Reporting: Do your customers want to see regular reports to reassure them that backups are working as expected? Do you have to manually create and send these reports by compiling data from multiple backup products and different data sources? If so, you might be spending another 30 minutes a day putting it together. That adds up to another 150 minutes per week.

These tasks, together, add up to more than 11 hours per week. That’s 572 hours a year that could instead be spent delivering billable value-added services.

According to the SpiceWorks 2020 State of IT report (available here), managed hosting, managed hardware support, and managed storage/backup will account for the biggest portions of managed service spend in 2020. So be sure you’re ready to make the most of your customers’ investments by handling backup and data protection in the most efficient way possible.

There’s a difference between growth in billings and growth in your business profitability. Pay attention to where your team spends its time, and factor that opportunity cost of labor into your profitability calculations. Backup doesn’t have to involve extra hours every week performing mundane tasks. Standardizing on one efficient data protection platform built for ease of use can make a huge difference in your profitability.

Consider turning over a new leaf this year by evaluating data protection solutions that can improve your efficiency and profitability. You can begin by reading the Buyer’s Guide to Data Protection, found here.

Carrie Reber is senior product marketing manager for SolarWinds MSP.