Why Every MSP Should Offer BDR
By Joshua Liberman, President, Net Sciences, ASCII Group Member Since 1996
As a full service manages service provider (MSP), one of our goals is to turn our clients’ networks into the black boxes they expect them to be. But with that comes the responsibility of assuring them all the bases are covered, especially when it relates to backup. With that in mind, there are three reasons you should offer every client a comprehensive data backup and BDR solution:
- it’s just too critical to omit
- since any failure is your failure, it just makes sense
- BDR can get you in the door at new client sites and it is a wonderful source of recurring revenue
It Is Just Too Crucial To Overlook
Most of our smaller clients have no idea there are so many moving parts to an effective backup strategy. They don’t know that they have to backup flat files, email and/or databases, do snapshots, or capture the AD state. And they sure haven’t thought through versioning, or recovery point, or time objectives.
They just want backup and think it’s simple, so it’s our job to educate them about the nuances of BDR, sell, and then implement it. And that’s why we provide backup to a local device with included off-site replication service and place it at nearly every site we manage. A wonderful side benefit of this is the pressure release we get from knowing that, should their server(s) fail, we can have them up and running in an hour and then resolve the failure off-line and without pressure. We had a site running eight VMs fail last year, but BDR saved their hide and — since the repair took two weeks — saved the client relationship as well.
It Just Makes Sense
Remember, we are asking these clients to place complete trust in us. Our goal is to make sure they contact us and only us for everything IT related, without exception. In light of this, it just makes sense to include a comprehensive BDR solution as part of this offering. Of course, providing a complete BDR solution can end up being the single most expensive offering in your portfolio, so positioning it properly and charging appropriately is very important.
Most of us have more than one level of MSP offering, so this service belongs in that top tier. If you offer just a single plan and cannot rebill this offering, you could consider making BDR an add-on. The big caveat here is that if you do break BDR out, you need to be prepared to sell, sell, and sell. We offer it as an add-on, and have managed to place it at nearly every site (starting at $150 monthly helps). And being able to make 20, 40, or even 60 points makes it that much sweeter.
Some Final Thoughts
The bottom line is that any network outage will be seen as a failure on your part. Regardless of whether it’s their fault, it is always your fault.
We had a site lose a server this past month, after two years of attempting to get them to adopt a BDR solution. When their six-year-old server finally failed, they had actually caused it (and admitted to it) themselves, by pulling two RAID drives from a running server while preparing for an office move. They had ignored six emails about BDR, skipped our lunch and learns, and refused to meet about this for two years. So they were down for about eight days, which they estimated cost them about $25K. Can you guess whose fault it was?
And one final thought: BDR gets us in the door with new clients the way firewalls did ten years ago. Placing a comprehensive BDR solution can be the wedge you need to open the door to a new relationship as well. What more can you ask for?