Meet Your Client: !Stanley SMB

He is highly anticipating summer, and has been searching for the perfect BDR solution that reduces downtime and data loss.

What Stanley doesn’t know is that these top 5 backup mistakes you’re making can potentially ruin his summer! Follow Stanley along his journey…

Mistake #1 – No Backup Uh oh! Your client, Stanley SMB didn’t have a backup solution in place and was dead in the water when hit with a business-crippling flood. Unfortunately, since you failed to provide a backup solution, Stanley’s hardware has failed, and he is unable to recover any of his valuable data. In effect, he’s been completely burned and there’s no extinguishing those flames.

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Your clients turn to you for the complete protection of their data. Without any backup coverage, they’re left completely helpless in the event of a flood, fire, earthquake, or other natural disaster.

DID YOU KNOW? •  30% of companies report that

they still do not have a disaster recovery program in place.

•  40% of businesses do not reopen after a disaster, and another 25% fail within one year according to FEMA

•  Survival rate for companies without a disaster recovery plan is less than 10%

Mistake # 2 – Failing to Test Your Backup Solution You’re providing Stanley SMB with a simple backup solution, so he’s out playing a round of tennis because he thinks his business is covered. However, a disgruntled employee who was let go last week decides to completely wipe the system and all critical files! Stanley SMB is depending on the backup solution you provided him, but there’s one problem… the data can’t be restored because you failed to test your backup solution! With this tragic mistake, your client is burned unexpectedly, and loses the match to severe data loss.

Sure, you’re giving them some coverage, but by failing to test your solution you didn’t ensure its reliability. If your client’s data isn’t backed up properly, the result can be major data loss that cannot be recovered, which is a fatal blow to any business. 

DID YOU KNOW? ¤  According to Advanced Data Recovery, U.S. businesses lose over $12 billion per year

because of data loss ¤  34% of businesses that back up their data never test their back-ups. Of those businesses

that do, 77% are found not to work ¤  By testing your backup and recovery plan, MSPs can more confidently promise clients their

desired recovery time objective (RTO), and ensure that they won’t have to pay penalties for over-promising with an untested RTO estimate.

You were hoping for the best by providing your client with a simple backup solution.

Mistake #3 – Not Having a Recovery Plan Stanley SMB decides to lounge by the pool because he’s confident his business’s data is secure with the backup solution you are now providing. He’s so relaxed that when he receives a call that the servers are down, he’s not worried. But when Stanley pops out of the pool an hour later to check his mail, he's unable to access his company's critical data and files. Stanley’s backups are safe, but his productivity plummets as you scramble to recover his data. He cannot sustain this unplanned downtime and loses money fast!

On its own, backup will not protect your clients against downtime in the event of a disaster or hardware failure. Your clients need business operations running 24x7. Even if your data backup solution has protected their sensitive data, they cannot remain profitable if they're unable to access and restore it in a time-efficient manner. Data security is only half of the problem. You also have to protect your clients' bottom lines, and you can't do that without implementing a disaster recovery strategy. DID YOU KNOW? ¤  International Data Corp. estimates that companies lose an average of $84,000 for every hour of

downtime. According to Strategic Research, the cost of downtime is estimated at close to $90,000 per hour.

¤  93% of companies that lost their data for 10 days or more filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster, and 50% filed for bankruptcy immediately (National Archives & Records Administration in Washington).

Simply providing backup is only half the solution.

While taking a roller-ride along the beach walkway, Stanley SMB thinks you have him covered against malicious attacks that could compromise his network. One of Stanley's employees falls for a sophisticated phishing scheme and opens a harmful attachment in an email. Luckily, you’re able to shut the group of hackers down before they steal important business records, however his network is still corrupted. Also, since your solution only backed up Stanley’s data once a month, he is unable to recover those records added after that restore point. Depending on your Service Level Agreement (SLA) with Stanley, you could lose his business all-together. It's also a lose-lose situation for Stanley because he's forced to play catch-up and loses productivity.

!Mistake #4: Backing up Infrequently

Disasters don’t follow a schedule, so you need to provide a strong backup platform that offers flexible data recovery. The key to staying one step ahead is to find a platform that lets you customize your clients’ individual RTOs, recovery point objectives (RPOs), and retention points.

DID YOU KNOW? ¤  2 out of 3 companies feel their data backup and disaster recovery plans have significant

vulnerabilities ¤  Important files should be backed up at minimum once a week, preferably once every 24

hours ¤  More than half (53%) of organizations surveyed revealed they do not conduct daily backups

The longer you wait between data backups, the more your clients and their records are at risk!

Mistake #5 – Having an Insufficient Data Retention Policy Playing volleyball in the sun, Stanley is more worried about his spike than his retained data. Unfortunately, when the IRS sends Stanley an audit request for his past 5 years of transactional records, he can’t access the data he needs because you only retained those records for one year! You didn’t maintain this essential data for the right period of time, and now Stanley is stuck in a sticky situation with only part of the necessary data he requires!

Data backup is important, but the ability to recover that data is equally as important. Your clients look to you to not only keep their data safe, but also meet the proper data retention requirements. When deciding on these terms with your client, you should take into account what’s optimal and cost-effective for their business needs. The best defense against this backup mistake is to create both long-term and short-term backup policies to ensure that your client is covered.

DID YOU KNOW? ¤  According to the Gartner Data Center Conference Survey, 50% of organizations struggle

with understanding what aging data is and what data should be discarded.

Sure, space is at a premium, but you can’t just retain only a few months’ worth of essential data.

With pairing BDR and business continuity, you’ve provided Stanley SMB with the ideal solution that ensures full coverage in every situation possible. Natural disasters? Check. Hardware failures? Check. Viruses and hackers? Double check. Even if CryptoWall’s worst nightmare comes creeping around Stanley’s business, he’s completely covered and backed by a 600+ technician Network Operations Center (NOC)!

The Solution – Fully managed BDR and Business Continuity

Thanks for Viewing! Sources: ¤  http://www.continuitycentral.com/feature0660.html ¤  http://www.adrdatarecovery.com/data_loss_statistics ¤  http://www.pcsupportgroup.com/blog/data-backup/data-backup-statistics/#sthash.yqqZXYEY.dpuf ¤  http://iosafe.com/industry-stats ¤  http://www.datarecoverylabs.com/how-often-should-you-backup-your-files.html ¤  http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2013/service-lines/data-backup-and-recovery/scary-statistics-on-smb-data-

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Learn the top drivers behind modern data retention, explore best practices to help you design and implement retention policies for your clients, and more by downloading this eBook! !"