Founding Father Benjamin Franklin’s famous line “Time is Money” provides an appropriate foundation for the development of our customer’s disaster recovery plan. Our dependence on computers means any delay or outage equals lost productivity and lost revenues – be it calling customers, handling transactions, drafting documents or some other business function.
ACRBO members are keenly aware that “Time is Money”. A staple of the computer repair business is the anxious business owner begging to be up and running. We are the first to see the financial (and emotional) consequences of debilitating user error, security failures and hardware malfunctions. When something goes down, the clock is ticking – and suddenly it is all eyes us to save the day.
While the ability to save the day is a core responsibility of a computer repair business – it is also arguably an ethical imperative to recommend some sort of prevention and disaster planning when we can. Unfortunately, too many customers come to appreciate the value of their data and their time when it is too late.
A great starting place is when encouraging your customer to implement a disaster prevention and recovery plan. In this plan, your customer should evaluate all the different ways in which data backup process of the organisation could be broken and affect the continuity of the company. It is about probability and having a plan to avoid surprises.
Having a few key points to encourage your customer to implement a legitimate prevention and disaster plan may help your customer make a wise choice. A core concept for your customer to think about is their “Recovery Time Objective”.; Here are a few questions to ask your customers:
What is the true value of your data? It’s easy to for granted access to our data – to our data for granted. If the data was gone forever what would they pay to get it back? No one backs up just for fun. They back up to recover.
What is the value of your time?
The real & opportunity cost of the time it takes to recover data from a loss is significant. Encourage your customers to consider both the wages & lost productivity they give up to find and recover and reproduce their lost data.
What customer issues does a data loss create?
It is not always obvious until it happens, but the consequences of a data loss don’t just hurt your client, it hurts their customers too. Their customers will experience the same lost productivity, recovery time and their associated costs as your clients. Additionally, they’ll lose one of your client’s most important assets: Trust. While your client works to recover, their customers will be communicating with the competition to keep things running.
Macrium software sells several backup software solutions to include in your package. Our Reflect software is able to backup Windows Servers, Exchange & SQL Servers, and PCs. We also have a package to mass install, set up and monitor your backups from a single console – and if you manage your client’s machines remotely, we have that too. For customers looking to take one time & manual backups, we suggest our Technician’s License which enables you to run Macrium Reflect on any machine from a USB key.
Putting together a comprehensive backup and data recovery package for your clients requires expertise, and there are plenty of options. While a data backup system is not a replacement for a disaster recovery plan, it should be part of it.
Since 2006 Macrium has been offering reliable, fast and competitive backup and imaging products. Data protection features include Image Guardian to protect your backups against ransomware, ViBoot to reduce downtime consequences, and Site Manager to monitor all of a network’s backups. ACRBO partners receive special pricing including generous discounts for internal use – reach out to Rain Networks, our ACRBO distributor for more information.
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