Choosing an MSP Backup Solution that is affordable

The selection of a reliable MSP backup solution is one of the more important decisions that you will make on behalf of your clients.

The right commercial backup solution can provide your clients with peace of mind that their business data is secure and can help you ensure that you can recover from any disasters quickly. However, choosing the wrong backup solution can lead to a significant loss of data and a severe blow to your reputation.

In this article, we will discuss the key qualities that you should look for in a backup solution, the risks associated with a bad backup solution.

Here are several more articles based around content about backups that may be of interest:

Service Provider Documentation - As It Relates

As a secondary goal of the main discussion here, I will also discuss how documentation can help IT consulting services manage and maintain backup and data recovery solutions effectively as it specifically relates to this topic.

There is a near infinite number of sites discussing every subject to do with being a service provider except how your documentation strategy affects them. All of my articles focus on the primary topic at hand and how it relates to MSP documentation and how it can be improved by having a solid documentation framework.

We can help you respond faster to your clients needs, allow less experienced staff handle tasks they otherwise could not and ultimately improve your profit margins while getting ahead of your competition.

Tech records are an essential aspect of the IT industry whether it be general backup advice discussed here or the steps involved on how you retain client data and when it should be deleted based on criteria such as their wishes along with regulations governing this activity.

It enables IT consulting advisors to manage and maintain the IT infrastructure of their clients effectively. Chances are that the company that consistently outperforms you in areas such as ticket completion times and number of tickets resolved in a day are likely doing it not because they are better than you but because they have an effective documentation strategy in place.

Backup and Disaster Recovery - Key Factors

A good business backup solution is important to the success of any service provider who offers that service to their clients..

I think that clients looking for a trusted tech partner have a tough time figuring out the best solution for their organization.

My advice to any business looking at a new technology partner is to look at their history. Ask for examples of when they have had to recover client information, times when it went wrong and ideally one or two current clients that they can contact.

As a service provider offering backup and recovery solutions, you should be prepared for these sorts of questions and handle them accordingly.

An effective backup and restore plan is often quite complex and it is easy for the less experienced to rely on a single disaster recovery vendor in either their hardware appliance, backup application or perhaps both and to easily get caught out when things go bad.

An organization of any size could have considerable financial loss regardless of how short the window is between the time the backup was lost to the time the information could be restored.Time rather than data is ideally the best measurement because the size of data modified can be so different between organizations.

***An example is a marketing company may have been down for 1 hour and lost 50 megabytes worth of information yet an accounting firm may have been down for the same time and lost 50 kilobytes of information and that small amount of lost data could have far greater impact than a few large graphics files.

Below are some of the qualities you want to look for in a good backup and recovery system.

Disaster Recovery Plan

A well thought out disaster recovery plan is just as important as the backup itself. Without a detailed recovery plan in the form of reliable documentation that gives any member of your staff a step by step plan on recovery, it becomes a pointless exercise.

Real world tests on recovery documentation and if your staff are able to recover data in an acceptable time frame with only the written user guides on hand is essential. Do not wait for your paying clients to have a serious data loss before determining that there are issues at hand.

You may have a mother-beautiful backup system that never fails. If you cannot recover the information in a timely fashion well, it's about as useful as pockets on a singlet.

Reliability

The best backup solution should be reliable. When I say reliable, it needs to be dialed in. If you have a technician who has to spend half a day reading hundreds of pointless backup alerts then it is not reliable.

In amongst all of those pointless backup logs, guess what? The one alert that will make you come unstuck and ruin your reputation is hiding, waiting like some sort of shifty looking crocodile waiting for the moment to pounce. Guaranteed it will happen at the worst possible moment too..

Dial in your alerts, spend time understanding what the backup email alerts mean and then decide if they should be discarded automatically in future.

Either it is important enough to take action or it's unimportant. Having a well paid tech spend 10 seconds 40 times a day canceling the alert that was triggered due to the same file name being too long or because the file no longer exists due to it being deleted between the backup starting and finishing is not efficient.

The Stuff You Don’t Know Is Just As Important

Getting backup alerts every time your backup fails is great; however what about backups that never run?

Most of us use Connectwise Manage or some other PSA to automate alerts through our help desk.

It is pretty simple, you set up the help desk email address in the backup platform of your choice and then along with the other couple of hundred backups you run, you sit back and wait for an exception to occur and the backup system to send an email to your support desk system telling you there is a problem.

What if the backup job never ran or was deleted by mistake at some point by a client employee or junior technician?

No email alert will be generated, you will not get a backup job failure alert and everything will run smoothly until that day when the client needs something to be restored or perhaps you are the client and will be the one contacting IT Support.

I would not like to be either party in that situation. It has been quite a while since I set up backup alerts on Connectwise and hopefully there is now a way to set up an alert to be raised if an action has not occurred.

**Whether you are a service provider looking for a backup vendor or a company looking for a technology partner, ask them this question:

“If a backup is deleted or fails to start, what systems are in place to alert you of this event”

If they do not have an answer, be very cautious of entrusting them with the lifeblood of your organization.

Security

A good backup solution should be secure. It should provide encryption to ensure that your clients' data is protected from unauthorized access. You will hear a lot about service providers moving from vendors due to high profile security incidents.

I tend to see this as a knee jerk reaction in most cases. Modern computing is always a balance between being accessible and easy to operate while also maintaining security.

Any business could come out tomorrow and advise they have the most secure system on the planet and it involves throwing a heavy safe with your information in that nobody knows the combination to over the side of a boat into the Mariana trench with no cables attached.

Nobody could argue that it is not a highly secure system that nobody is likely to break. It's not very user friendly though is it? So between that extreme example and the other end where you open it up to everyone and make it very user friendly yet with no security at all there has to be a happy medium.

Every single piece of commercial software on the market today walks this tightrope and is engaging in commerce knowing that their system could be more secure than it is.

83% of applications have a security flaw according to this. My view is that the other 17% are not being realistic.

Popularity in of itself is a weak point for any application and most of the time the security incident occurs due to a mistake made by an individual employee and not the application itself.

So these security incidents are not going to go anywhere, large vendors come with large targets and will occasionally be hacked. It does not mean their competition is any more secure than they are, it's just not their turn yet.

The best you can do here is leave fear out of the equation. Diversify with your backup strategy for each client and attempt to have fall back plans in case the horse you have bet on breaks a leg so to speak.

Ease of Use

A good backup solution should be easy to use. It should be easy to set up, configure, and manage. As mentioned above, there is a bell curve where making it easier will often make it less secure.

Generally it can also be said that any backup that is easy to use often lacks a lot of features that anyone beyond a home user is not going to want to do without.

Some of the best backup solutions on the market such as Veeam backup and recovery tend to have a very steep learning curve and their ease of use is quite low yet in my opinion they are probably right at the top as far as quality and features are concerned.

Affordability

Some say good backup software should be affordable however that is quite a subjective statement. I have been in situations where I have seen data recovery solutions either outright fail or because of the way they are implemented or the lack of features, the restoration in my view was a failure.

It is my strong belief that the best backup and recovery system is the most expensive you can talk your client into buying. More expensive backups mean more features and higher reliability along with allowing more time for techs to work on planned maintenance and things like recovery testing.

It is not all about profit margins and making money, it is more about being able to get a good night's sleep. Clients are nearly always going to go for the cheapest backup option you offer with regards to a backup offering. They often view backups as an on or off switch.

Either it works or it doesn’t and as we all know, that is not true at all. If you know a backup offering is lacking, it is best not to offer it.

Backups - Client Expectations

Most of the time the client is not onboard with your first, second or even second choice and that is fine, it is their money to spend as they see fit.

Something I have seen service providers do that I feel is wrong is that when the client inevitably has a circumstance where they experienced data loss where their backup system did not manage to recover their data, the service provider will often feel as if it is their shortcoming or their responsibility.

Client expectations surrounding backups and setting them early on both in discussions and in writing with signatures is so important. This is because all the client will remember is that you are backing up their stuff, they are paying you for this, they needed the backup and it did not recover the information they have lost and so naturally, as the backup provider, you are likely to be unpopular and unfairly blamed.

Giving client expectations early on and ensuring there is a record may well be important for contractual reasons but more than that, it is evidence that you had the conversation, you explained why choosing the cheapest solution was a bad idea and while perhaps the client may be still upset, you can rest easy knowing you did everything you could for this situation not to happen.

In the distant past I was a managed service provider and towards the end, I removed all lower tiers of backup and did not give clients a choice, it was either a backup solution that I was comfortable with or we would not take them on.

Ultimately if you put in an otherwise reliable backup system knowing it has blind spots then telling the client when something goes wrong “See I told you so, here is your signature” it is never going to end well no matter how many signed pieces of paper you have.

At the very least it is likely to damage the relationship and at worst you may find you have to answer to it in court where there are no guarantees, a huge waste of time and often everyone wins a prize except you.

Perfect Disaster Recovery Solution - Even They Can Fail

You may have the most perfect backup system on the planet but there are always circumstances that can result in serious amounts of lost time even with a great backup solution.

Example time! I once had an overconfident employee, he was talented but had way too much confidence when compared to his abilities or experience.

One day I received a phone call from a long time loyal client advising that after the Small business server (long time ago now) we installed last month, there seemed to be records missing from their MYOB database.

So this was a solid month after the tech had installed and set up the new file server and it was a company of around 20 staff with around 5 who were heavy users of MYOB.

Long story short, I logged on and verified that my staff member had copied the MYOB database file as a backup and somehow shared both copies. Some of the staff had been using one and some the other.

Both databases were restored and were in perfect working order and do you know how much use that was in this situation? The backups were pointless.

We contacted a number of MYOB specialists and I was prepared to pay for it to be fixed myself; however they all said the time it would take to attempt to rectify the problem, it would be easier to just copy the changes made in one database to the other. In other words the client had to do about 80 hours of labor to re-enter the information even though we had a flawless backup system.

Moral of the story is that backups will not cover you in every situation and you should advise your clients that there is always a risk of a situation where work will need to be re done.

Another Example!
Same employee, we had a VSphere Host server with about 6 virtual servers running and at about 430pm on a Friday he was scheduled to bring the host down and do an update on the VSphere OS.

As I was walking out the door I said to him very clearly “Please check to ensure that the VSphere OS is only installed on a single disk, if it is installed across the RAID array, whatever you do, do not do the update”

I then got him to repeat the instructions back to me. Queue the phone call at 6pm letting me know that the virtual machines were missing but he had got the update done with no problems.

It turned out that he ignored my request and went ahead with the update without checking. I was thankfully able to recover all 6 servers from backup except for a single file that was less than 400k in size and of that only about 50k was corrupt.

For that file I had to go back to the day before to recover it. I cannot remember the application except it had the “gold” in the name. It was the accounting package that the (thankfully small) client used for their business and wouldn't you know it, they had spent the last 2 days working on all of their end of year tasks.

That was tough and as any business owner knows, it does not matter who created the problem, you have to own it. I took responsibility for the issue and I think I gave them 2 months free server hosting (expensive back in the day) and they accepted the situation.

I had explained the installed backup system at the start of the contract and it was a competent solution for the price, and I was within the service levels, the client still felt let down and regardless of the technicalities, I felt as if I had failed the client.

Conclusion

Offering a reliable backup and recovery solution is complex. While you can buy an off the shelf backup solution in a number of forms, there will always be risks involved. Being able to convey this to the client without losing the sale can be tough.

We hope this article has provided you with a solid foundation and understanding of this topic.

We have a number of other backup hardware articles listed below that will provide you with more detailed information on a number of related topics:

https://optimizeddocs.com/blogs/backups/backup-hardware-index

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