Data Recovery Options

Making the Case for Data Recovery Software

As with other IT services, data recovery comes at a cost to organizations. And as with any cost, organizational leaders may balk initially. Resources are finite, and IT may seem like the last of their concerns.

MSPs know this scenario all too well. But they also know that it's important to make the business case for their services.

You can start with the prevalence of data loss. In one survey, more than 20 percent of organizations reported that they had suffered an outage and could only partially recover data. More worrying is that most organizations are not prepared for this kind of event. In fact, the survey found that almost three-quarters of those organizations weren’t prepared for data catastrophes.

With nearly 43 million cyber security incidents per year, the chances of data loss are far from slim. But data losses aren’t only caused by malicious cyber attacks. Data breaches can happen by accident, often as a result of human error, according to experts at Sophos.

And the financial costs are far from modest. The loss of critical applications can run more than $5,000 a minute. That’s an astonishing and potentially catastrophic cost for organizations. And it’s just one more reason spurring MSPs to find the best data recovery options.

Hidden Costs of Skimping on Data Protection

Data losses indeed incur financial losses. But outages and permanent losses can produce other, less quantifiable losses to organizations.

Consider this hypothetical scenario. A team of employees has been developing a highly anticipated report. The employees have spent countless hours on research. They’ve worked through outlines and drafts. They've spent lots of time emailing each other. Their time invested is anything but small.

Then a shared hard drive crashes. And with that crash, much of the employees’ work is lost because the organization did not invest in any data recovery options.

The employees will have to make up for lost time — a direct cost to an organization concerning salaries. Less quantifiable is the inevitable loss of morale that attends such a disaster as employees find themselves once again starting from scratch.

Backups are an essential defense against these scenarios, experts say. Regular, strategic backups allow business to keep operating as usual, whether a hard drive crashes or a virus spreads throughout the network. And the costs — either financial or time spent planning a disaster-recovery strategy — pale in comparison to those of a data disaster.

Types of Storage

While researching data recovery options, one consideration is the kind of storage you’ll use. One option is on-site storage. The other is off-site (remote) storage. Both come with costs and benefits. One tends to win out for small and medium-sized businesses, the typical clients for most MSPs.

Some businesses choose to store their data onsite. In this approach, regular — or irregular — backups are performed on local, onsite media, such as large-capacity hard drives.

One benefit of onsite storage is reduced bandwidth consumption. All backups are carried out on local media, eliminating any bandwidth used to upload large files to offsite servers. This can help organizations that have capped bandwidth, either for uploading or downloading.

Another benefit of onsite storage is speed. Because the data is stored locally, its movement doesn’t depend on Internet connections. Onsite storage may be quicker for this reason.

Some organizations may place greater trust in on-site storage. Local data seems to be within reach — and outside anyone else’s hands — which is a plus for those who prefer to maintain greater control over network resources.

On-site storage faces significant costs, though. For one, keeping backups local can put data at greater risk. On-site storage may not be as secure as off-site facilities, where dedicated experts focus their attention solely on physical and cyber security.

Local, physical storage is also subject to the whims of nature, such as snow storms or hurricanes. Servers may be stolen by disgruntled employees, and hard drives can crash — without a redundant backup.

Last, costs may be prohibitive for on-site storage. An organization may only be able to afford so many hard drives, which places a hard limit on backups.

Off-site Storage

Off-site storage has grown increasingly popular among businesses. In fact, in a mid-2014 survey, 59 percent of IT and business professionals reported using cloud storage in their operations. When considering data recovery options, the cloud’s benefits include cost, scalability and savings in time.

First, and perhaps most important for organizational decision-makers, is cost. Managing onsite servers can be expensive with costs that many small organizations can’t afford. Off-site storage saves those immediate, upfront costs and leaves them to a third-party vendor.

With off-site storage, organizations themselves don’t house the hardware, solving the issue of scalability. Cloud storage can offer nearly unlimited storage capacity. Organizations face a limit, of course, from the vendor’s dollar-per-gigabyte cost of storage. But these costs tend to be far lower than the equivalent in local storage.

Cloud storage also saves time during data migrations. Local storage systems are often refreshed every three years. These can be time-consuming activities, and about 84 percent of data migrations take longer than expected, researchers estimate. Cloud storage eliminates these disruptions and removes server downtimes.

One potential drawback of cloud storage involves bandwidth. Unlike local storage, cloud backups require data transfers over the internet. This takes up bandwidth, which may be an issue for some organizations.

Another potential concern is security. Organizations must ensure that their cloud vendor offers ironclad security. Storing data in the cloud requires a measure of trust, and organizations should do their research to ensure that their vendors take security seriously.

The Preferred Data Recovery Solution for MSPs 

IT professionals have numerous data recovery options. So, why do MSPs continue to choose SolarWinds MSP (formerly LOGICnow)?

It’s simple: we offer a 99.999 percent uptime guarantee while saving you time and money if a disaster strikes.

MSP Backup & Recovery maintains business continuity through:

• True Delta. The strongest data recoveries begin with regular backups. With cloud-based storage that utilizes True Delta, we track changes at the block level. This makes your backups lighter weight, saving in bandwidth costs and allowing you to back up more data.
• Faster recoveries. If an outage strikes, you need to be able to act quickly. SolarWinds MSP gives you the power to recover to virtual servers and physical servers alike, with recoveries in windows as small as five minutes.
• Support for virtual systems. Get increased flexibility with support for Hyper-V and VMware ESX platforms.
• Back up database files rapidly. MSPs don’t only need to back up Word documents. With True Delta, you can track block-level changes for Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server, among many others. This can reduce backup windows by 60-80 percent, as compared to regular, file-level backups of the data.
• Tough-as-nails security. Our globally distributed data centers feature 24/7 protection. You benefit from private key encryption, as well as end-to-end encryption, with 448-bit Blowfish encryption among your options.

Software-Only Option

Have a client who prefers onsite storage? Not a problem.

With our software-only version, you can maintain bulletproof data recoveries on a client’s private infrastructure. Features include:

• Speedy backups. Benefit from True Delta, with compression and deep duplication that narrow the windows for data backups.
• Recover to virtual servers. With our software-only version, you can restore at any point from a standby virtual server.
• Recover to bare metal. If you need, you can perform bare metal recoveries.

A Local and Cloud Hybrid

MSP Backup & Recovery also offers a hybrid cloud recovery option, so that you can back up data to local and cloud servers. It’s an extra layer of redundancy that offers peace of mind to the most cautious MSPs.

With our hybrid solution, you can:

• Maintain syncing across local and cloud servers. Your systems remain perfectly synced at both levels, so you don’t have to fret about mismatches in backups.
• Speed up restores. In the event of a data emergency, MSP Backup & Recovery will automatically select the fastest recovery option for you, whether that’s from the cloud or local servers. This offers enormous benefits for organizations with both telecommuters and in-house employees.
• Spread backups across devices. You can store your local data on network-attached storage, USB drives or even a user’s machine.

Part of a Larger Solution

Of course, data recoveries are only one piece of the puzzle for MSPs. SolarWinds MSP’s MSP RMM offers a comprehensive suite of IT tools to protect your data, all located within a single dashboard. Features include:

• Active discovery. With a single click, you can monitor every device that enters or exits your network and protect against a data-disaster threat.
• Web protection. Websites laden with malware can be at the root of a data recovery effort. With MSP RMM's web protection, you can keep users off blacklisted and unsecured sites and safeguard your network from infectious malware.
• Managed antivirus. Our industry-leading antivirus solution offers almost-perfect protection against viruses and other forms of malware that can corrupt data — and cause a catastrophe.

Risk Intelligence

MSP Risk Intelligence protects your data, mitigating the need to perform data recoveries. Features of our industry-leading solution include:

• Permissions discovery. Network-wide scans uncover inappropriate file permissions that can lead to a data breach.
• PII discovery. Sensitive personally identifiable information lurks across many organizations’ networks. A breach of this data can come with enormous costs. MSP Risk Intelligence allows you to root out this data in the hardest-to-find locations.
• Risk reports. MSP Risk Intelligence reports put an exact dollar figure on an organization’s data vulnerabilities, which helps make a business case for services like MSP Backup & Recovery.

Safer Email

Data disasters can also originate in email. With MSP Mail Protection, we’ve got you covered. Our platform offers:

• Aggressive protection. Keep users safe from malware, phishing attacks and other potential causes of data disasters, with SolarWinds MSP’s secure email gateways.
• Mailbox continuity. If your primary infrastructure goes down, users can continue using email via our cloud-based interface.
• Flexible archiving. Disasters aren’t the only cause for data recoveries. MSP Mail Protection allows you to easily archive and retrieve emails, just as MSP Backup & Recovery allows you to archive files, folders and even servers.

Sign Up for a Free Trial

Give MSP Backup & Recovery a try. We offer a free, no-hassle 30-day trial of our platform — and get you up and running in 10 minutes.

About SolarWinds MSP 

SolarWinds MSP (formerly LOGICnow) delivers the only 100% SaaS, fully cloud-based IT service management (ITSM) platform, backed by collective intelligence and the highest levels of layered security. SolarWinds MSP’s products including Risk Intelligence, Remote Management, Backup & Disaster Recovery, Mail and Service Desk – comprise the market’s most widely trusted integrated solution.

Deployed on millions of endpoints across hundreds of thousands of networks, the platform has the industry vision to define and deliver the future of the market. SolarWinds MSP provides the most comprehensive IT security available as well as LOGICcards, the first ever IT notification feature powered by prescriptive analytics and machine learning.

SolarWinds MSP's passion is helping IT professionals secure and manage their systems and data through actionable insights, rewriting the rules of IT.

For more information, visit www.solarwindsmsp.com.

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Sources:

Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council: http://drbenchmark.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/ANNUAL_REPORT-DRPBenchmark_Survey_Results_2014_report.pdf
ISACA: http://www.isaca.org/cyber/Documents/State-of-Cybersecurity_Res_Eng_0415.pdf
Sophos: https://www.sophos.com/en-us/medialibrary/PDFs/other/sophosprotectingPII.pdf
TechSoup: http://www.techsoup.org/support/articles-and-how-tos/your-organizations-backup-strategy
Business News Daily: http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/6294-benefits-of-online-data-storage.html
TechTarget: http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/answer/Offsite-vs-onsite-storage
CIO: http://www.cio.com/article/3018156/cloud-computing/cloud-adoption-soars-but-integration-challenges-remain.html
TechTarget: http://searchcloudstorage.techtarget.com/tip/Cloud-storage-advantages-Solving-five-common-IT-problems