SMBs, Back Those Apps Up
The evolution of the cloud has opened up all types of bells and whistles related to dealing with workflow management, application implementation and maintenance functions and data and content storage up there. So, for an MSP focused on growth and new revenue-generating business lines, it's easy to get caught up in joining the fray.
But as cloud services ramps up, the time-tested staple of manged services remains back up and disaster recovery (BDR) services, especially for SMBs. Dialing it down even further, if an SMB has fewer than five employees but revenue exceeds $1M per employee, there's ample opportunity for BDR rollouts. Here's why: Despite some small companies raking in a cool million/employee, they still have pretty simple processing environments that have a need to aggregate, track, store and protect data.
According to a Q1 survey from Symantec, most SMBs fitting this profile have little to no business continuity or disaster recovery plans or architecture.
So depending on the recovery time objective (RTO) of a given company, it may do an MSP that is moving into cloud services some good to hold off on bells and whistles and instead, sound the trumpet for an industry staple that has been driving growth in the first place. After all, even in the cloud SMBs still need to back those apps up.
Posted by Jabulani Leffall on April 11, 2011