Sell Business Continuity — Not Backup
By The Business Solutions Network
An MSP sees a huge uptick in monthly billable hours with a large mortgage company after replacing the client’s image backup software with a business continuity solution.
One of the most frustrating things every VAR or MSP has to deal with is clients who reject sound advice and put their businesses at risk in the process. Nowhere is this situation more serious than when it deals with backup — and more specifically with data recovery. Jacob Hiller, owner of MSP INTELITECHS, recalls a situation that occurred with a large mortgage company client a few years ago. The incident became a hard lesson for the client, but it ultimately led to a major turning point in the MSP’s relationship with them and resulted in a myriad of new business opportunities.
Legacy Imaging Software Yields Painfully Slow (And Costly) Recovery
INTELITECHS started working with the mortgage company seven years ago, when it had just 30 employees and two branches. Since that time, the Utah-based company has grown to 300 employees, dozens of branches, and $1.4 billion in revenue. While the 
client experienced a lot of changes over the years, one piece of advice it refused to heed was upgrading its backup software. “When we first started working with them, they had just one server and used a tape backup system to back up their data,” recalls Hiller. “As the company grew and added more servers, we talked to them about upgrading to an enterprise class BDR [backup and disaster recovery] solution, but they insisted that the expense was unnecessary.”
The mortgage company opted instead to use basic image-based backup software and run incremental backups each night. “This was working great until it needed to do a recovery,” says Hiller. “What should have taken 5 hours took 18 hours to get their production environment live again.” The server crashed because a Hyper-V virtual machine (VM) snapshot corrupted. “The imaging software could only perform a restoration to a physical environment, and then the restored data had to be converted back to virtual,” he says. “In addition to a long recovery time, the client lost an entire day’s worth of work due to a lengthy backup interval. When all was said and done, the cost of the downtime and lost data was worth more than $20,000.”
Managed BDR Leads To Fast Recovery Times, Upsell Opportunities
Not long after the recovery debacle, INTELLITECHS was introduced to StorageCraft while attending a technology conference in Salt Lake City. Hiller recognized right away that this was the kind of solution his mortgage client needed. “Shortly after signing up to be a StorageCraft reseller, I approached the client to discuss how it could prevent a future recovery mishap,” he says. “I first educated the stakeholders about how StorageCraft ShadowProtect is more comprehensive than what they were using in that it can provide image-based backups to protect against server corruption or failures. Plus it can perform file-based backups, which are useful for recovering accidentally deleted files or folders. Additionally, ShadowProtect supports virtualization, which means that we can restore a backup image to dissimilar hardware. This feature minimizes downtime and gives us time to repair or replace the primary server. And finally, the solution is fully managed, which means that we and the client can receive an email or text after every backup, and if a backup is ever skipped for any reason, we’re immediately notified.”
The biggest differentiator with StorageCraft, says Hiller, is that it focuses on recovery — not just backup. “There are a lot of companies that perform flawless backups, but far fewer companies can recover data quickly and reliably,” he says. “If our mortgage client had been using ShadowProtect, we could have recovered their server in under an hour, and they would not have lost more than 15 minutes’ worth of data.”
What’s also nice about ShadowProtect, says Hiller, is that he can prove its value to clients and prospects. “During a presentation, we can take a snapshot of one of their servers, run a virtual boot, and have a working copy of their server up and running on our laptop within a few minutes. Not only is that helpful to win the sale, but we can include this process as part of our quarterly testing, ensuring everything will work as planned when a real emergency happens. With the previous software, it would take nearly 24 hours to run a test, plus the client would have needed an exact replica of its production server, which just wasn’t practical.”
Hiller says that the BDR upgrade was a turning point in the customer relationship. “We used to visit this client only 3 hours every other week,” says Hiller. “Today, we’re spending 65 hours a week on site, helping them with everything from IT management and business consulting to onboarding new employees. The client’s backup needs have grown significantly, too. They are now backing up eight servers and nearly 2 TB of data with the StorageCraft ShadowProtect managed BDR solution. What’s nice is that if they ever had a problem like the one they had a few years ago, we would be able to get them back up and running in 30 minutes with just 15 minutes of data loss. This project has opened up other opportunities for our company, too, and has played a key role in our 40 percent revenue growth over the past three years.”