Starting a Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery Managed Services Business

Written by: By Bennett Klein, product marketing director, Instant Recovery On Demand, CA

In today’s challenging economic and highly competitive climate, businesses and other organizations such as government agencies, healthcare providers, and educational institutions can’t afford to have their mission-critical applications and information disrupted due to system issues, planned and unplanned outages, or natural disasters such as hurricanes, fires, or floods. So, how can SMBs, with shoestring IT staff budgets, find a cost-effective way to provide this critical availability? In many cases, leveraging a managed services solution is the answer. That is good news for managed services providers (MSPs).

Because SMBs and similarly sized organizations typically don’t have the expertise in-house nor can they afford to hire a consulting firm to help design, build, and support a business continuity and disaster recovery solution, these organizations often rely on a backup plan to protect their data, but those do not protect their applications in the same manner. This can leave them exposed to some daunting problems because, while a backup and restore solution is important, it does not offer a high-availability solution for critical applications and data.

Here lies the opportunity for MSPs. A growing option for many SMBs is managed business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) services.

Today, there are a wide variety of MSPs offering everything from software as a service (SaaS) to complete IT outsourcing and hosting. These MSPs offer everything an SMB needs to help ensure continuous availability to critical applications and data — from the hardware and software to 24x7x365 availability of their DR facilities and staff. Some include services to help you assess your environment, identify your critical applications and data, and do everything from deployment to managing and supporting the entire solution. A BC/DR managed service can also be deployed far faster than a do-it-yourself solution ― the entire failover data center infrastructure is already in place for use.

While there are a number of MSPs in the market that have been selling services to the SMB market, many solution providers have yet to embrace software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings that provide much lower capital expenditure requirements as compared with traditional software purchases. In today’s economic climate, paying less cash upfront is a compelling argument to place in front of a line of business or C-level IT executive and a competitive differentiator for a solution provider’s sales force.

To build a managed services offering, solution providers typically have two options — build the complete infrastructure themselves, or adopt a turnkey solution already available in the market. Building your own solution requires a complete datacenter with scalability that supports a large customer base, including the operating system, application and replication/backup software, a management tool (typically web-based) that’s easily accessible by customers across a distributed geographic region, full IT staffing to support the service level agreements you offer, and your own backup and business continuity solution for the data center itself.

In addition, you need to understand your cost structure to ensure you go to market with pricing that delivers profitability. Start-up costs for this option can be high - it can take months to build or find a hardened data center, and the associated risk may be high as well. For some solution providers, reselling an existing managed services solution, may be the faster, easier and less risky approach— with the option to build their own solution down the road. It is still unclear whether a homegrown solution is more profitable than reselling another solution, considering the time-to-market and associated start-up costs.

Whether you build or resell a managed services BC/DR solution, there are a number of important features solution providers should consider. To start, you will need remote installation, management and reporting so you can deploy, manage and maintain the solution without the expense of a site visit to your customers’ location. The solution should be able to be installed and maintained on your customers’ production servers without having to reboot their systems—avoiding any disruption to their business. Replication should be WAN-optimized to keep networking costs to a minimum. The solution should offer both manual and automated failover, so that your customers can decide when to redirect their end-users, based on their individual business needs.

Finally, the most important aspect of the solution is automated DR testing, a way for you and your customers to test the availability of their failover or replica servers, applications and data, whenever and as often as they need—giving them piece of mind that their failover system is ready when they need it most!

For solution providers looking to resell a turnkey offering, look for those with the right level of experience, facilities and staff to match your own target customer market. Look for a solution that is offered on an affordable subscription basis — like your utilities — so your customers may use operational budget versus capital budget, and you have minimal cash outlay and risk. This typically means there are little to no upfront costs to your customers, and they are up and running in a day or less, depending on their environment. Vendors who offer solution providers a managed services solution to resell, should be experts in their field, employ the latest technology in their data center, monitor your customers systems’ health, and basically provide a turnkey solution to help keep your customers most critical applications and information available to their employees.

Now, SMBs can realize the same level of business protection that large, global enterprise organizations enjoy — at a fraction of the cost. A solution like this will quickly pay for itself starting with the first unplanned outage your customers’ experience. For solution providers, now is the best time to investigate high-margin managed services for data protection, business continuity and disaster recovery. It can help differentiate you from other providers that only push hardware and software, and provide a way to build even stronger long-term relationships with your customers. Now your customers can focus on growing their business while you, their trusted partner, focuses on protecting their business.

Bennett Klein is a product marketing professional with more than 20 years experience with marketing data protection, storage, and high-availability software for all size businesses worldwide.