Business Continuity Opportunities Go Beyond BDR

Recently, we posted an article about the broad array of “as-a-services” that exist in the world today. One that really stands out is disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), but the term might be a bit limiting. Disaster recovery will keep clients safe in the event of a computer emergency, but there are dozens of other things that can cause a business to slow to a crawl or stop altogether. MSPs who focus on DRaaS by itself might be missing out on some revenue opportunities they might get by focusing more broadly on business continuity as a service (BCaaS).

MSPs get to see the intricacies of a client’s network and they know how employees work and what they need to get done. They should understand a lot about what’s happening in an organization they’re servicing, simply because they’re responsible for their computer networks. Being in this position means the MSP has insight into things that a lot of businesses might not think a lot about, and that means an MSP has the opportunity to make a neat profit offering not just backup and disaster recovery services, but in offering business continuity consulting and implementation as well.

The Business Continuity Difference

Remember that disaster recovery and business continuity are two different things. Disaster recovery tends to involve things like system availability. Can you recover your computer systems from anything? But when we talk about business continuity, backup and recovery is just a small piece of it. Business continuity involves every single thing that can get in a business’s way of doing business. MSPs can help clients figure out how to keep business running in the face of internal and external threats by talking to them about how to make sure they’ve got redundancies among employees (meaning every task can be completed by at least two people) all the way to things like making sure the building is secure against thieves, and that employees are safe online (these are just a few examples).

Other Business Operation Factors

There’s a large array of things that stop a business from running and it might be that an SMB hasn’t had much time to consider what they would do if one of them shuts down the business. By offering clients business continuity consulting, you can not only profit on the consultation, but you can also make some profit by implementing anything they need on the network end. There’s no reason why MSP service should stop at simple backup and disaster recovery—there are more ways help clients, especially when so many things can threaten their ability to do business.

There’s a lot involved in business continuity and it’s likely that most MSPs will probably have to do some research to learn what extra types of business continuity services they can offer, but they can certainly boost profits by selling solutions that cover business continuity needs from end to end.

For some more thoughts about business continuity check out our article “Flexibility: A Tool for Building Better Business Continuity.” 

Casey Morgan is the marketing content specialist at StorageCraft.