For years, cybersecurity experts told us it was a matter of if – not when – every business would become the victim of a cyberattack. Those warnings, which long fell on deaf ears, have come true for many companies over the past several years.
Today, most business owners and managers are true believers in the importance of security, with many becoming converts the hard way (following an attack).
This hard reality of probability is what cyber resilience is all about – assuming that an attack will be successful at some point. In this frame, fighting the bad guys on every possible front means the ability to withstand a successful penetration of your defenses. And that means the ability to backup and rapidly restore data, systems and devices at any scale.
Even backups can (and should) be strategic
It’s not so long ago that backups were more about system or hardware failure than criminal behavior. Backing up data essentially meant manually backing up files from an on-prem server (or servers). Copies were then stored off site in case of a fire or other on-site catastrophe. Of course, threats from bad actors existed, but not at the scale of today’s hyper-networked business models.
That approach won’t cut it today. With business operations now centered in – and our “new normal” of remote work increasingly dependent upon – all things cloud, backup needs to be much more nuanced.
This means new opportunities for MSPs, but it also means breaking down the importance of scalable, strategic backup and restoration to your customers in ways they can quickly buy into:
- Your clients need comprehensive backup and restoration power: any plan for achieving resilience should imagine worst-case scenarios and work backward from there. This works to your benefit on two fronts. First, it immediately provides your clients with confidence that you’re making sure they can withstand a massive event. Second, planning for system-wide restoration ensures that you don’t overlook anything in your planning.
- They also need granular backup and restoration power: there used to be a tradeoff in restoration decisions. You’d have to weigh the value of data and systems you’re expressly trying to recover against the cost of rolling back entire servers, departments, business units or, for some SMBs, perhaps the whole company. Today, with the right strategy and the right provider, backup can be much more strategic. You can even target individual endpoints and the SaaS data of individual users – both of which are chronically overlooked in backup strategies – with backup services that provide rapid restoration.
- The right provider makes it automated and painless: the key to backups is ensuring they happen automatically. The right provider can synchronize all your client backup needs, so they happen quietly and automatically in the background while business proceeds normally.
More than ransomware protection
Since they keep your clients awake at night, ransomware threats offer an obvious opening point for client discussions about backup protection. But it’s also essential to drive home all the other risks backup and restoration can protect them from. With you at their side, they’re protected from natural disasters, hardware failures and accidental (or deliberate) file deletion at the individual employee level. And armed with the right backup and restore partner, they can achieve affordable and reliable cyber resilience.