Will Neglecting Mobile Device Backups Be Your Downfall?

By The Business Solutions Network

One of the hottest trends we've covered over the past year is the mobile device explosion. More specifically, we've talked about BYOD (bring your own device), the reality that your customers' employees are bringing their laptops and smartphones to work and using these devices both for personal and business purposes. This opens up a whole can of worms, starting with security issues and extending to your data backups.

Here's a question you may not have considered: "What kind of policy or system do you have in place to back up your customers' mobile devices?" Or, what about this: "How are you helping customers distinguish security and backup policies for employees' personal data and their corporate data?" If you're currently selling backup and disaster recovery (BDR) services, there's a really good chance that your BDR vendor isn't going to be much help in answering these questions either. In fact, in the recent BDR test we conducted with seven leading vendors, only one of the seven currently had the ability to back up mobile devices. (stay tuned for the BDR product review, available at BSMinfo.com within the next couple of weeks, to find out which one backs up mobile devices).

The bottom line is this: your customers are counting on you to be their trusted adviser. If one of your customer's employees loses their mobile device along with hours of corporate data that wasn't backed up, you'll quickly drop from trusted adviser status to "one throat to choke."