From ASCII Atlantic City: 5 Great Quotes, 2 Helpful Business Continuity Tools

By Jim Roddy, VP of Marketing, RSPA

Back in late May, Business Solutions published an article titled “How To Sell Backup? Stop Pitching Fires, Floods, And Famine” based on a presentation by Rob Rae, the vice president of business development at Datto, at the ASCII Success Summit in Columbus, OH.

Today at the ASCII conference in Atlantic City, Rae talked again about backup and business continuity but his presentation wasn’t the same old, same old. Here are five memorable quotes and two valuable resources from his talk.

• “People suck. People do horrible things to those beautiful machines you build. Adding crap. Deleting crap. Downloading crap. Facebooking crap. We (technology providers) are gainfully employed today because people suck. Stop talking fires and floods to your customers and start talking about people.”
• “The single biggest winner for us the past year-and-a-half is Cryptolocker. This is Ransomware-as-a-Service. These 14-year-old Russian hackers aren’t just disrupting businesses anymore. They’ve now figured out a way to make money doing it. Start talking with your customers about hackers instead of talking about tornadoes. That’s how you’re going to make money.”
• “You need to tell the business owner, ‘I don’t care what the disaster is, I’m going to get your data and save you money by eliminating downtime.’ Talk business continuity with the owner.”
• “There’s a boatload of anxiety with the cloud. Amazon goes down for five minutes and my wife can’t order a box, or your kids have their Xbox go down for three minutes, and they act like the world is coming apart. How far did the hackers who stole celebrity photos set back the cloud? That publicity has generated a lot of cloud anxiety.”
• “I know there are a lot of you who are still selling 1935 tape backup today. Admit it — you’re doing it. It’s like crack; you can’t get away from it. Any SMB who has more than 10 days of downtime, there’s a 70 percent chance they will be out of business in 12 months. We saw that with Hurricane Sandy. You need the cloud as a backup to your backup.”

These aren’t Rae quotes, but they are helpful solutions provider tools I wanted to share with you:

• An infographic titled “Traditional Backup vs. Intelligent Business Continuity” can be implemented by MSPs to help their end users understand why they need to move beyond traditional backup solutions.
• Datto’s Recovery Time (RTO) and Downtime Cost Calculator helps businesses determine the financial impact downtime will have on their business. Rae did offer this quote when discussing the calculator: “Your kids aren’t actually processing math. They’re using calculators!”

The ASCII Success Summit – Atlantic City is being held October 22-23 at the Bally’s Atlantic City Hotel and Casino in New Jersey. It is the last of eight solution provider-focused conferences ASCII hosted in 2014. For more information on ASCII, go to www.BSMinfo.com/go/InsideASCII.