BDR 101: Be Proactive Ahead of Storms by Updating Business Continuity Plans
Instead of having your on-call employees sitting around, waiting for data and backup disaster recovery (BDR) customers to go dark amid ongoing Winter storms across the U.S., be proactive by focusing on ways customers can make your job a little easier.
You know the basics: Work with your small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) customers to develop some type of business continuity (BC) plan. While many of your customers may already have one (since you’ve taken care of that, right?), it may behoove you to go back to older plans and update them by connecting with your customers (it also shows that you’re on top of your game).
Even if you don’t have the time to go through each plan, take a look at Clients First CTO Mark Chinsky’s basic outline, which we reviewed back in October, and go over his points with your customers.
For your convenience, the following main points are what Chinsky outlined for MSPs looking for a basic BC plan:
- A list of all people involved in the recovery process, including complete contact information such as personal email, cell phones, addresses, social media, etc. You don’t know what services may or may not be operating during a disaster.
- Alternatives to key people if they happen to be on vacation, unable to get around or even if they are injured. All these alternate people need training in advance.
- All key information such as passwords and encryption keys that may be needed. Information should be stored securely, but on paper, too, so that a regional power outage won’t prevent the ability to retrieve the data.
- Perhaps a standby location to operate from. A larger company may use a permanent service for this; a smaller company may do something such as designate a key manager’s basement and have it setup with card tables, chairs, extra laptops, a supply of bottled water and shelf stable food, cellular accesspoints, a natural gas generator etc. (Note: Hurricane Sandy showed us the limitations of gasoline generators. Almost all gas stations in badly affected areas lost power and couldn’t pump fuel.)
- Procedures for regular testing of business continuity plans, including at least an annual full simulation.
By reaching out to customers during storms (if you’re ahead of the game, you would have done this already), MSPs can show how valuable their services are to SMBs, which can then lead to new opportunities through simple word-of-mouth marketing.
Follow CJ Arlotta on Twitter @cjarlotta for further updates on the story above.
