3 BDR Trends: Tracking the MSP Market for Backup
The data backup and disaster recovery (BDR) market has evolved since its introduction, and even since the beginning of this year. What should managed services providers (MSPs) expect going forward, and where should they focus their efforts?
To find out where the market is heading, we reached out to Clients First CTO Mark Chinsky, an expert in the field, to find out if he could provide us with top BDR trends. His response focused on the following three concepts:
- Traditional cloud backup solutions are unacceptable.
- BDR solutions need to be simple for non-technical customers.
- Educating customers is key.
Traditional cloud backup solutions are unacceptable
Chinsky said traditional cloud backup solutions can be a nightmare for customers. It takes too long for customers to upload and download data in an emergency and technical support lines are more than likely overcrowded.
He said some vendors are offering customers disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), which basically allows customers to spin up in the cloud.
"Again, they don’t have a practical plan to fall back on when things get back to normal and most cloud-only solutions result in significant delays while drives are being shipped back and forth," he said.
BDR solutions need to be simple for non-technical customers
Customers need to be able to understand how their BDR solutions work, Chinsky said. Some businesses may have hardware from one company, software from another, and storage from a third.
"During an emergency, your IT manager may very well be on an island in the Caribbean with little to no internet access," he said. "Or during a disaster, your MSP could be swamped with calls, like during [Hurricaine] Irene."
He suggested MSPs offer "brain-dead" solutions to customers, so customers can implement them quickly in a dire emergency.
Educating customers is key
Chinsky said one of the biggest challenges in the market is education. When his company gets the opportunity to educate small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) on downtime, they get it — and his approach.
"However, most SMBs don’t even know this problem exists so they aren’t searching for the solution," he said. "So we need more mass market education of the exposure so many companies have on this front."
I couldn’t agree more with
I couldn’t agree more with this statement: “Again, they don’t have a practical plan to fall back on when things get back to normal and most cloud-only solutions result in significant delays while drives are being shipped back and forth,” he said.
We recently completed testing and evaluation with 3 of the top DRaaS vendors and found that none of them perform very well at all in the failback scenario. Even when there is an onsite appliance these vendors don’t have mechanism in place to replicate from the cloud back to the appliance. Instead they ship you a drive, and the cloud recovery environment has to be stopped while that drive is in transit and while the contents of that drive are recovered to the onprem servers because, again, there is no way to sync the cloud environment to the onsite appliance in real time.
So what does Mr. Chinsky recommend as a workaround or alternate solution?
Jeffrey,
The problem is,
Jeffrey,
The problem is, typically with these hybrid solutions, you are going to the cloud after a serious disaster. Often resulting in destruction or damage of your old servers (and possibly BDR). Internet speeds are not nearly fast enough to sent what is often Terabytes of images over the line.
The key is you don’t have to fail back right when you get your office and hardware back online. Our EverSafe! program allows you to have a new appliance (or just your images) overnighted to you on your schedule. So for example, we can ship at 5pm on a Friday for Saturday delivery. Then you go in and do your restores over the weekend and your company is back up first thing Monday morning.
Jeffrey:
Thanks for reaching
Jeffrey:
Thanks for reaching out to us. We’ll reach out to him for an answer!
–CJ
Jeffrey,
Failing over to the
Jeffrey,
Failing over to the cloud is usually a ‘last resort.’ With Hybrid Cloud solutions, most failovers will occur and the local device and restoration is quick and easy with our EverSafe! platform.
If you do need to failover to the cloud (i.e. disaster scenario), we would coordinate with you such that once you have offices and new hardware, we would overnight you either a drive or complete new BDR (if it was destroyed) fully populated from our data center. We could do this, for example, at 5pm on a Friday evening for Saturday delivery. Then you can restore and test over the weekend and go live Monday morning with little to no interruption.
There really is no other way around this until either most of us have gigabit internet connections or invent transporters 🙂