With data security threats including Ransomware, insider attacks and data breaches in headline news, as an MSP your customers are more aware of the impact of potential data loss than ever before.
Despite this ever-growing awareness, many organisations still don’t receive the right level of protection from their chosen Business Continuity solution, with many still deploying a standard daily Backup to protect highly transactional data. This is leaving a costly disparity between expectation and reality when invocation is required – often at the blame of their IT service provider.
Veeam’s latest 2023 data protection trends report highlights that:
- 82% of organisations currently have an ‘availability gap’ between how fast they can recover and how quickly their systems can be returned to productivity after an outage.
- 79% of organisations also currently have a ‘protection gap’ between how frequently data is backed up and how much data they can afford to lose.
Helping to assessing the data protection gap
As a solutions provider these statistics offer an opportunity to review the recovery expectations for both potential and existing customers – to fully, and openly discuss RPO and RTO expectations with your customer.
Assessing RPO
Recovery Point Objective is the amount of data an organisation can afford to lose after an incident occurs. For example, if an organisation backs up once a day at 11PM, and an incident occurs at 10PM then the organisation would have to revert to information taken at 11PM the day before, resulting in the loss of a full working days’ worth of data.
This could an acceptable solution for organisations with very little data churn, but for those with greater data dependency, for example, a Medical Practice, then losing 24 hours of data is irreplaceable and can have long-term implications on both the health of the patient and the productivity of the facility.
For some organisations even a minutes of data loss is unacceptable and Continuous Data Protection (CDP) is the best solution, with data changes replicated off-site in near real-time.
For example, if a major high street retailer was to lose access to their systems and needed to revert to a backup, then all transactional data from the time after the backup would have been lost. The company’s stock levels would now be inaccurate, and the organisation would need to employ staff out of store opening hours to manually check stock levels. The additional cost of this would be much, much higher than if they had deployed a solution offering Continuous Data protection.
Assessing RTO
It’s also important for your customers to assess their Recovery Time Objective. This is the length of time that it could take to restore the organisation back to full productivity after an incident and it drastically varies, depending on their chosen solution. For example:
Organisations using a daily Tape Backup to protect their information would not only lose 24 hours of data, but they would have to physically retrieve the Tape from the off-site storage. Data would then need to be physically transferred back from the Tapes to the company’s active systems.
Similarly, with a Cloud-based backup solution, how long would the data transfer back to the primary system take? Depending on the bandwidth availability, this could be hours, if not days. Solutions such as CloudCover Shuttle can help, but a well thought out disaster recovery plan needs to be in place.
For a more in-depth exploration or RPO and RTO and how it applies to an organisation, please read our blog “Business Continuity Planning: RPO and RTO”
The MSP opportunity
The last few years have seen significant IT modernisation and changes, particularly due to the impact of COVID-19 and remote working, but it’s important that Business Continuity plans are kept consistent to meet these changes.
With 82% of organisations now holding a data availability gap it’s an ideal time for MSPs to help customers review their internal SLAs and provide to a more appropriate solution designed around their needs.
If you need any advice about reducing your data availability gap, or to speak to our partner team about how to become a disaster recovery solutions provider, contact us on +44 (0)3453 888 327 or email enquiries@virtualdcs.co.uk.
