Disaster Recovery as a Service can provide you and your clients with a level of protection and recovery that goes far beyond the ability to backup and restore data, writes Björn Bakker.

What if I told you there was a way you could provide your business with more income on a recurring basis, while making your life easier and less stressful and providing a wonderful service to your clients (and building their loyalty) at the same time. Sounds pretty good, huh? Of course you would be interested.

First of all, understand this: if your clients’ disaster recovery preparations revolve solely around backing up and restoring data, their level of protection is woefully inadequate, and they may be in for a rude awakening when disaster strikes.

Even if their backups are good and their data can be restored, how long will they be down after a disaster? More importantly, how long can they afford to be down? How long until their loss of income caused by the down time puts them out of business?

When disaster strikes, they are going to be looking to you to help them get on their feet again. I don’t have to tell you how much stress and chaos this could cause you. Not only this, it could negatively affect your client’s view of your company and could severely harm your brand.

A Win-Win

This unpleasant situation where you and your client are both negatively impacted doesn’t have to happen. You can provide them a level of disaster protection and recovery that goes far beyond the ability to backup and restore data. You can make their job and yours a lot less stressful when disaster strikes. You can make the day-to-day management of your schedule and workflow a lot easier. And you can provide your business with a steady stream of recurring revenue. Pretty cool, huh? Talk about a win-win!

So how can you bring about this very desirable situation? By selling your clients on the idea of DRaaS, Disaster Recovery as a Service. DRaaS can be defined as “the replication and hosting of physical or virtual servers by a third-party to provide failover in the event of a man-made or natural catastrophe.”

With DRaaS, you handle all of your clients’ data protection and disaster recovery needs for a set monthly amount. You and your client both benefit – they get the protection and peace of mind they are looking for, and you get a recurring revenue stream. Plus, you can expect increased customer loyalty, and when disaster happens, your job is going to be a lot easier!

DRaaS can be tailor-made for SMBs that cannot afford the same type of extensive recovery infrastructure a large enterprise might have. With the cloud, SMBs can have a first-rate disaster protection and recovery umbrella in place without having to invest in their own offsite IT infrastructure.

Plus, there are no unpleasant cost surprises for your clients – they know up-front exactly how much to budget.

Here are some ideas that can help you sell DRaaS to you clients more effectively:

• Although it’s easy to do, especially when you are a techie, don’t focus on DRaaS as “cool technology” when you are talking to your client. Focus on it as a solution that can save the business money, time, and stress. Focus on the benefits to your client.

• Without being a “fear monger”, paint a vivid “word picture” about how your client’s current backup-only scenario is woefully inadequate and the difficulty they could experience if there was to be a catastrophe and they don’t have a solid recovery plan with near-instantaneous failover in place.

• Don’t pitch a “one-size-fits-all” solution. Ask relevant questions that will help you determine your client’s needs and craft a solution that can meet those needs for them.

A data backup doesn’t do you much good if IT takes so long to recover from a catastrophe that your client’s business is forced to close. DRaaS just might help you prevent such an undesirable situation. And it can provide you some pretty nice benefits too.

 

Read this blog post to find out more about DRaaS.

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