Backup and disaster recovery has long been the lynchpin of managed service provider product and service offerings and will continue to be, if a new survey out in January of 2011 is any indication.
According to Symantec's 2011 SMB Disaster Preparedness survey, SMBs without a BDR plan was higher than 47 percent, very much the same as the year ago period.
Symantec surveyed 1,288 SMBs, which it classified as companies with fewer than 1,000 employees. Additionally it surveyed 522 of those SMBs' own customers in 23 countries to gather the findings.
Now because most SMBs freely admit they don't have plans in place, this represents an awesome opportunity for MSPs specializing in business continuity consultation or offering BDR product lines to either upsell or beef up their portfolio.
"There's not that big of a change since last year," said Bernard Laroche, Symantec's senior director of SMB product marketing in a statement. "The number of SMBs with a disaster recovery plan is going down instead of up. SMBs still haven't recognized the tremendous impact a disaster can have on their businesses."
If you figure half of companies with less than 1,000 workers aren't prepared, just imagine how many SMBs with 500, 100, 50 and -- for the majority of American small businesses -- fewer than 10 lack a BDR strategy.
This could mean that MSPs with a loyal SMB client base can sound the BDR alarm or at least broach the subject. And as we've learned with this roughshod economy, disaster is often right around the corner.
Posted by Jabulani Leffall on January 12, 20110 comments
As has been established in past posts and as a general rule, especially in the early days of managed service providers, smooth IT often involves a viable business continuity plan.
So, what happens when you lose power? I'm not referring to the pull, props or clout you have in the office among peers of subordinates; we're talking about a power outage. That's where hardware and systems equipped with uninterruptible power supplies more than comes in handy.
Many MSPs for instances offer hosted servers that are supplied with conditioned UPS power that will run even if utility power fails. At the optimum level UPS power subsystem is N+1 redundant with instantaneous failover.
What that algebraic equation (i.e. N+1) above refers to is the even more granular use of power supply modules.
In medium and large enterprise environments, as well as activity-intensive small businesses, continuity is important.
A single, large UPS can also be a single point of failure, which can disrupt other systems, the N+1 redundant, fail-safe approach leverages UPS modules that can operate independently of one another.
If you're an MSP, you should consider folding this into your service offerings. If you're a business retaining an IT service shop for managed services, you should insist on it.
Posted by Jabulani Leffall on December 08, 20100 comments