Best Practices For Defining Business Continuity Plans

By Neal Bradbury, Senior Director of Channel Development, Intronis MSP Solutions by Barracuda

Every business has a different tolerance level when it comes to application downtime. Some can endure a few hours, while others will start losing revenue, and even customers, within minutes of a failure. At the end of the day, though, the total impact of a failure really comes down to the types of applications the business is running.

Today’s SMBs tend to run a wide variety of applications, some of which are more critical to the operation of the business than others. As such, it has become increasingly important that SMBs gain a clear understanding of how the failure of one or more of these applications will affect their business, and how much downtime they can afford if one were to go offline for a few minutes, a few hours, or even a few days. One of the ways they can gauge their tolerance for application failure is through business continuity planning, an area that can be extremely valuable for SMBs — and lucrative for MSPs and solution providers as it offers a recurring revenue stream that can drive profitability.

The fact is, MSPs offer a unique value proposition when it comes to business continuity planning. First, they understand how to translate business needs into priorities and vice-versa. Next, with each completed business continuity planning project, they add to the sum total of their knowledge and expertise. Lastly, managed services providers (MSPs) and solutions providers can serve as a sounding board to their SMB clients to ensure that they are all making educated and informed decisions around business continuity planning.

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