In today’s fast paced economy, organizations find themselves in a bit of a conundrum. As they assess their tolerance for downtime of business-critical application, they often find out that their ability to restore systems to an operative level exceeds their tolerance for downtime. For example, they may find they can only tolerate 2 hours of downtime for an online-ordering system, but they can only restore it within 4 hours. That means 2 hours of lost sales and lost productivity not to mention brand and reputation damage. This can add up quickly. Investing in the infrastructure necessary to meet these shrinking windows can be costly. Using an MSP to manage your backup and recovery processes can often be a lower cost, lower risk solution.
Managed Service Providers who provide data center level infrastructure services understand that business continuity and data protection is probably more important than day to day operations support. A good MSP will sit down with you and understand your business processes and the impact on the bottom line if any of those processes were interrupted. You will jointly draw up a strategy to ensure your business has the continuity it needs to compete effectively.
Data protection plans from an MSP should include SLAs – Service Level Agreements – that communicate the agreed upon metrics around guaranteed uptime, security, power, and redundancy. The SLA’s should spell out procedures for backup and disaster recovery, as well as physical and cybersecurity.
Again, as mentioned in previous blog posts, look for flexibility from your MSP in this area. You may have an existing data center on-site that has accrued complex backup and recovery parameters over the years. You can work with the MSP to handle data protection processes through a solid plan and augmented staffing, along with remote monitoring and proactive recommendations to head off potential issues, such as a fast-growing database that will be soon exceeding the current backup capacity.
Alternatively, you may find your needs are such that you have your entire IT infrastructure hosted within the MSP’s secure data center. It’s important to understand how the MSP protects your data, as well as what security policies are in place to protect access to your sensitive data. Do they truly understand what it takes to support a sizeable corporate data center and protect it? Do they have experience in large business critical applications, such as SAP or Oracle? This knowledge comes in handy as troubleshooting application performance in terms of data availability is a cumbersome task with so many technologies involved: server, storage, network, database, virtual machines, etc. The more an MSP understands the total infrastructure stack the more confident you should feel that your applications will be meeting SLA requirements of users and customers.
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