Reporting data backup and disaster recovery (BDR) efforts to customers can be an important task for managed services providers (MSPs) in demonstrating the value of the service to customers.

Strata Information Technology, Inc. President Pete Robbins sympathized with MSPs struggling to communicate the value effectively.

“As an MSP, showing the value of your service can be difficult, especially when everything is working well, he said. “The client may never see you.”

To overcome this challenge, Robbins sends a monthly report to all of his customers. The report provides each customer with their own overall score on network health.

“The report summarizes what we are managing, results of some of the automated services performed, how many tickets we received and how many were resolved within 2 days,” he said.

Additionally, Strata IT sends a summary of how many scheduled backups and screenshots were successful during the monthly time frame, as well as how much data is being backed up and sent offsite.

“Lastly, while several of our BDR’s automate doing daily screenshots, we manually start up a VM for each of our BDR to make sure we can actually turn on the VM and access it,” he explained.

Robbins last spoke with us on his experience with BDR customer concerns, hoping to provide some insight for MSPs learning the ropes of BDR.