Richard Tubb offers an Informative whitepaper providing advice on business continuity in the cloud
London, UK: “Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are increasingly required to provide a Disaster Recovery (DR) solution for their clients. Those MSPs who don’t offer DR advice prior to a disaster often find themselves held accountable after their client suffers a disaster,” is the view of Richard Tubb, a highly respected IT expert. In his view, the lack of a DR position, “...at best will leave the MSP scrambling to provide resources to help their client’s recovery, at worst this will mean the client will have to seek assistance from a rival MSP.”
Off site Disaster Recovery is viewed by many as a stepping stone into cloud computing. However, Tubb suggests that both end customers and MSPs should not just assume that backup into the cloud is a magic bullet. “The key element many SMBs typically forget about in a BDR strategy is testing their backup plan. Taking the steps to backup data is one thing, but having the reassurance that in the event of a real disaster that critical data is actually available is another,” he warns.
In his view this testing phase is often overlooked. “From the MSP’s perspective, testing often falls within their responsibilities and testing backups can be a laborious task,” he explains. “This testing process needs to be undertaken not once, but on a frequent basis to provide peace of mind to both the MSP and their client so that in the event of a disaster, the client is protected.”
In a new whitepaper authored by Tubb and sponsored by Doyenz, the expert provides an overview of the issues as well as practical steps to better educate both customers and resellers around the processes of evaluating a cloud based backup and disaster recovery solution.
In his view, the UK market is not short of backup solution providers as traditional tape backup vendors move into cloud storage. “The challenge for an MSP, who typically has to look after tens or dozens of clients, is that most of these backup services are aimed at individual SMBs. MSPs require the ability to monitor client backups, and be alerted to any issues,” he comments, “They want strong reporting, and the ability to take an ‘at a glance’ snapshot view at the latest status of all client backups.