How MSPs Can Prepare For Covid-19 And Beyond

By Dan Timko, J2 Global

The threat of a global pandemic can be nerve-wracking, especially for managed service providers. After all, if a pandemic materializes, not only will you have to keep your own operations going, but dozens, maybe hundreds of businesses will be depending on you to provide them with vital IT services.

That pressure can cause MSPs to have tunnel vision, in which they plan so much for customers’ needs that they neglect to adequately prepare to keep their own ship afloat during the crisis. I recommend taking some advice from the airlines:

“Put on your own oxygen mask before helping others.”

What follows are recommendations for MSPs to prepare themselves and their customers for a potential pandemic. While the prospect is alarming, it’s also an opportunity to help your customers when they need you most. Nothing will strengthen a business relationship more than coming through for them in a pinch, so make sure you’re in a position to deliver. You won’t be able to serve them well if you can’t keep your own operations going, after all.

Protect your own people first: Be as flexible as possible with paid time off or allowing employees to work remotely when possible because you don’t want sick people coming to work out of a sense of obligation or need. Instead, you want them to focus on getting better, and you definitely don’t want them infecting other employees. If someone shows symptoms, insist they go home. If it is minor, they can likely be just as valuable working from home these days while not putting the rest of your team at risk.

Communications are also critical. People need to know who to contact if they need to stay home and if they have any questions. Make sure everyone knows who to contact if they do stay home and who they can call for answers.

Finally, make sure you have plenty of soap and hand sanitizer available so people can wash their hands frequently, and remind people to avoid handshakes until this situation is resolved.

Understand what IT assets and services most important: Take inventory of the systems most vital to running your own business and make sure people can access them remotely. If there are important systems and applications for which you can’t currently provide remote access, make it a priority to do so, even if you have to work with a third-party.

Do the same when working with your customers. They need to know what IT assets are the most important for day-to-day business operations. That way, you can prioritize to ensure they remain available.

Conduct a skills inventory and determine those most vital to you and your customers: Once you’ve identified the key skills you need, cross-train multiple people so you’ll still have them available, even if many fall ill. Encourage your customers to do the same.

Identify assets at risk in the event they can’t be maintained: If your area undergoes a lengthy quarantine, it’s a certainty that some equipment, applications, and services will eventually fail if no one can come in to perform routine maintenance. It’s critical to know which assets are most vulnerable so you can either arrange to maintain them remotely or replicate them to the cloud.

If neither of these choices is an option, devise workarounds to keep IT running. For customers, help them offload vulnerable assets and services to your environment or connect them with other providers who can help.

Review your backup and DR plan: If you’re an MSP, chances are you already provide BaaS and DRaaS to your customers. This is most definitely the time to review, update and test your own DR plans.

Make sure you can restore your customers’ applications and data remotely as well as your own. Don’t be shy about leveraging other providers’ resources to augment your own capabilities, either. Just make sure they, too, have a robust plan to keep services running in a worst-case scenario.

This should help you get started, but there are plenty of other resources available, including this great checklist from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Covid-19 could serve as a forcing issue for many of your customers to finally create a plan for operating even in the face of a disaster. But, don’t focus too much on novel coronavirus. Even if a pandemic doesn’t occur, these disaster preparations will help you and your customers handle an array of major and minor disasters, from inclement weather to local flu outbreaks. After all, this time around, you and your customers have time to prepare. The planning you do now will go a long way toward weathering a major natural disaster that comes with no warning at all.

About The Author

Dan Timko is Chief Strategy Officer at J2 Global.