Start of Hurricane Season a Good Time to Talk BDR with Clients

Springtime is a time for flowers, leaves on trees and new grass – a manifestation of nature’s own recycling program – but it also marks the beginning of weather patterns that can create less-inviting scenarios. Between the tornado season, the hurricane season kickoff and what traditionally has been the start of a fire season, springtime lights up a veritable cauldron of natural disasters just waiting to boil over.

That’s why MSPs at this time of year should be talking to their clients about data backup and disaster recovery (BDR) strategies. With those clients who already have a strategy in place, this is a good time to review their plans to assess whether they still meet all of the clients’ requirements.

Are all new users included in the backup process? Are they aware of recovery procedures in the event of a disaster? Have any systems been installed recently that require some kind of upgrade to the BDR?

For clients who still don’t have a BDR strategy – or are lax about the need to back up their data – it’s obviously a different conversation. Any business in this day and age that doesn’t back up regularly – or doesn’t have a recovery plan in place – is playing with fire, considering data is the lifeblood of the modern business. MSPs do their clients a disservice by not spelling out the risks and explaining how to mitigate them.

Off-site Requirements

When discussing BDR in the context of natural disasters, you can’t ignore the off-site component. You can’t recover from a disaster unless data is stored somewhere accessible. If a building gets flooded in a hurricane, blown away in a twister or destroyed by fire, backups won’t do much good if they have all taken place in-house.

MSPs, therefore, should be educating clients about the advantages of a cloud-based data backup service that creates copies of all their business data in a safe place. Ideally, all data should be replicated off-site in a location with built-in redundancy so that even the backups are backed up, leaving nothing to chance.

In addition to providing off-site data replication, MSPs should spend time with clients prioritizing which systems, applications and files to access first in the event of a disaster. Businesses will want to first recover their most critical systems – those that allow them to resume operations once systems are back online.

A business heavily dependent on online sales will need its ecommerce and warehouse systems to operate, while a telemarketing firm will want client databases and call center applications to be restored as quickly as possible.

And in a worst-case scenario that a building is destroyed or unusable, the business will need access to its data regardless of location. That’s when anytime, anywhere access becomes more than a marketing talking point. And it’s a big reason why cloud-based BDR is necessary: It might just save your client’s business.

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