Find Your DRaaS Partner and Make Disaster Recovery a Strategic Part of Your Service Portfolio

You may already be managing backup services for some of your clients, but haven’t yet expanded to offering a complete disaster recovery service. Or you simply haven’t added Managed Backup or Disaster Recovery (DR) to your service portfolio at all. Either way, there are good reasons to consider offering your customers DR, not just as a source of recurring revenue, but also as a sticky service that can create a more trusted advisor relationship that leads to new business. It has become easier to add DR to your portfolio with the advent of Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), especially when working closely with a DRaaS partner.

DRaaS is a perfect example of an on-demand cloud service that is always on and scales with your client’s needs. For you and your customers, there is the added benefit that you don’t need to keep a second data center for redundant servers and communications services. An additional perk for you is that DR brings in new customers, such as SMBs, who will find it easier to start small and scale as they grow.

DRaaS offers three other main benefits to your customers:

1. Immediate recovery from any kind of disaster with system failover to a secondary infrastructure within minutes.
2. Depending on needs and resources, customers get the flexibility to customize the scope of recovery from all types of disasters, from malware and ransomware to hurricanes and wildfires.
3. DRaaS offers seamless redundancy and no single point of failure to keep data securely protected in the cloud and away from the primary site.

Working closely with a customer to plan for recovery from a disaster that could jeopardize their business, requires that you get a clear understanding of their key operations and those parts of the business that are mission-essential. This disaster recovery planning approach is more strategic and collaborative between provider and customer than with a managed backup service, and requires you and the customer to predefine playbooks for exactly how to respond to different disaster scenarios. This is your opportunity to take your relationship with your customer to a new level. If you are able to add value and insights, you can earn their trust and develop a longer-term relationship with greater revenue potential.

Working on the disaster plan will involve taking the customer through a thorough risk assessment to identify vulnerabilities in their infrastructure. You may ask, which components are the most important and how do they impact their critical business functions? You will need to calculate both the financial and non-financial costs. Besides loss of revenue, there is the potential loss of opportunity; for instance, companies that recover faster, gain a competitive advantage.

The goal of all this analysis is to develop with the customer what they believe is their realistic recovery time objectives (RTO). In other words, how long can their infrastructure afford to be down? This is often a compromise between what they view as ideal and what they can afford. Similarly, you will also set the recovery point objectives (RPO), which define what level of data must be recovered and at what time-based increment or schedule, which should follow directly out of the analysis of critical business functions.

Qualities and Benefits of a Reliable DRaaS Partner

Having a technology partner that is focused on providing disaster recovery can be helpful during this process. A good DRaaS partner will have extensive experience in helping companies recover from many different kinds of disasters. This experience can be leveraged in formulating a sound disaster plan. Should the time come that a disaster does occur, it’s good to have team members onboard who routinely handle disaster situations and can meet the challenge with a measured and effective response that only comes with experience.

Your DRaaS partner will be particularly useful in the setting and defining of RTO and RPO objectives. These objectives set the parameters for the SLA you agree to and define your relationship and your obligations going forward. This includes identifying the cost-effective services and configurations that are recommended for your customer to meet their RTO and RPO, including full or partial failover, and hot site or warm site replication. It is critical to get it right at the beginning, and this is where the extensive experience of a DRaaS partner can be drawn upon to ensure that the defined service achieves the customer’s objectives as well as your own.

Finally, your ultimate objective in defining a DR plan for your customers is to identify where they are most vulnerable and to help them to address those weaknesses to prevent disasters altogether. Again, you will have to move the needle on your relationship to go beyond reacting to their needs to anticipating them, and as a result, positively shape the way they operate their business.

This is why DRaaS is much more than an additional revenue stream or a sticky service, although it is both of these things. It is above all an opportunity to move you from being regarded as just a service provider to being a trusted strategic long-term partner for their business.

Thrive to the Rescue

Your Backup and Disaster Recovery Heroes

Thrive is a trusted global provider of comprehensive cloud, data protection, and security services and can help to guide as you work through your SMB or enterprise DR planning process.

Since 2001, Thrive has provided these robust and secure Managed Cloud and Disaster Recovery Services from a scalable multi-tenant infrastructure, supported by our first-class in-house technical team. Thrive delivers highly flexible and responsive solutions with outstanding value and service, using state-of-the-art technology to offer ultimate protection and peace of mind.

We are driven to be your trusted partner and to ensure that we deliver a Thrive Experience that meets your business requirements with the reliability, scalability, and support that your business demands.

Contact us today to discover your options around partnering with us to provide your customers with data loss prevention solutions and rapid ransomware recovery with services such as DRaaS Veeam managed appliance for VMWare and HyperV, DRaaS physical server replication, and other Thrive DR services. Ensure your business continuity by meeting your operational demands while protecting and recovering your most valuable asset – your data.