Selling BCDR: Let Stats Do the Talking

As a service provider, you know SMBs, and thus many of your clients, need a business continuity disaster recovery (BCDR) solution. Their very survival depends on it. The trick is to get them to understand that the lack of a robust, proven BCDR solution puts their company at risk, and that they may be only an outage away from a disaster!

Your first selling objective is to prove the true and deep danger outages and disasters pose. These impacts are very much in the news, so you can use real-world data points as testament.

Do not clobber them with dozens of facts. Instead, pick a few choice ones for disasters and outages or downtime.

For example, did they know that …

Do they also know that BCDR works, and that …

The Perils and Cost of Downtime

IT downtime costs $5,600 per minute on average, and an hour of downtime is $300,000 on average and as much as $540,000 for larger companies, according Gartner.  Information Technology Consulting Research (ITCR) found some shops have it even worse. In fact, 33 percent of those recently surveyed said an hour of downtime cost some $1.5 million.

Your clients can calculate their own labor cost of downtime. Simply take the number of employees, their fully loaded pay, including all benefits, hours worked per week, and how many workers would be impacted by an outage. Then look at how much revenue is produced each hour. Add the lost revenue and the fully loaded cost of labor and you have your total loss from an hour of downtime.

Another metric is to examine revenue loss. Take:

Then use these values to perform this equation:

Revenue loss from an hour downtime = (GR/TH) x I x H

Some companies lose more than others, like those with a high level of transactions such as online retailers, busy brick-and-mortar shops and banks.

The Cost of Data Breaches and Data Loss 

Downtime costs money, but even worse is a breach that destroys data or ransomware that takes it away forever.

Data loss has increased some 400 percent since 2012.

Ransomware is particularly egregious, and its costs rise every year. By the end of 2019, ransomware will hit a business every 14 seconds.

According to the Unitrends’ The State of the Cloud and Data Protection Survey 2018 survey, “Data loss continues at an unacceptably high rate. Almost the exact percentage of respondents (30 percent) reported losing data across the three years of the survey. Whether the cause is the rise and continuing threat of ransomware, natural disasters, or internal threats, every year one third of organizations report losing at least some of their data.”

A study from Cybersecurity Ventures finds that damages from ransomware cost $5 billion worldwide in 2017, and will more than double to $11.5 billion in 2019. One big factor: Companies cannot recover the data encrypted by cybercriminals.

Ransomware costs money, an average of $133,000 for each attack. Worse, more than half of all organizations are hit by ransomware every year. In some cases, the cost of ransomware attacks reaches into the millions, often due to repeated attacks.

With a proper BCDR solution, extra copies of that data are always at the ready.

The Single-Vendor Advantage 

Some SMBs lack effective backup, never mind BCDR. Meanwhile, larger prospects may have multiple backup vendors. However, using four or more backup providers leads to data loss, an average of 5.47 TB, argues service provider Dynamic Business Technologies. “The second highest average loss of data was 4.02 TB, resulting when no data protection solution was implemented. The lowest amount of data loss (0.83 TB) occurred when only one data protection solution vendor was selected,” the company said. Having a single vendor for your clients’ BCDR will dramatically reduce data loss.

Unitrends MSP

Unitrends MSP addresses BCDR with the combination of a ransomware-proof Linux appliance and an always-available cloud layer of backup. The new Unitrends Done Deal program that offers MSPs a free paying customer to get their BCDR service rolling further sweetens the deal.

Request a demo today, and discover the transformative power of BCDR from Unitrends MSP.

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This guest blog is part of a Channel Futures sponsorship.