Help clients avoid disruption to their operations.
As a managed service provider (MSP), helping your clients maintain business continuity is more important than ever. The concept that business can go on, no matter what happens — say, a natural disaster or network outage strikes — has become even more crucial, given the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on speeding the trend of hybrid and remote work.
With a dispersed workforce opening organizations to more disruptions, such as those caused by cyberattacks, MSPs are at the forefront of ensuring business can go on uninterrupted. You can become a trusted partner to your clients by helping them develop a business continuity plan, or a detailed plan of action to allow a business to continue operating in the event of disruption.
Resilience, Recovery, and Contingency
Developing a business continuity plan comes down to three concepts: resilience, recovery, and contingency. To foster resilience, start by identifying the business’ most critical elements. From there, work to mitigate risks to those elements by engineering systems that allow for high availability and the ability to recover data quickly. The idea is to ensure business can go back to normal as quickly as possible in the event of a disruption.
To help businesses recover, they need to be able to relocate any impacted systems and optimize any limited resources in the meantime. Preparing for disaster means creating backups of all crucial data, plus setting benchmarks for what levels of availability or performance need to be achieved for systems to be classified as recovered.
To create a contingency plan, you’ll start by conducting a business impact analysis (BIA), which involves determining which threats an organization faces, assigning each one a probability factor, ranking them for importance, and preparing a report detailing each threat’s possible effects and how to mitigate them. From there, you’ll help them put preventive controls in place, create contingency strategies, and run tests, trainings, and drills to ensure these strategies work. You’ll also need to update your contingency plan as needed, based on the latest threats and technologies used.
Five Cloud Solutions to Help Businesses Maintain Continuity
Offering cloud solutions will be a key part of your business continuity plan, allowing your clients and their employees to continue working, access files remotely, mitigate risks, recover data, and minimize business impact. We’ve pulled together five cloud solutions to help your clients maintain business continuity that are available in the Pax8 Marketplace.
1. Addigy Increases Business Efficiency with Device Management
Addigy enables modern device management, allowing clients to effortlessly manage, deploy, and secure their clients on macOS, iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS devices across multiple end users and locations. Clients, in turn, can save countless hours onboarding their clients and reduce time spent on billing. It allows your clients to amplify their productivity and empower their employees to do their work across multiple devices in a secure fashion.
2. DefensX Reduces Risk by Isolating Endpoint Threats
DefensX focuses on end user protection, converting a traditional web browser into a zero-trust secure browser. DefensX’s zero-trust threat prevention technology protects users from advanced cybersecurity attacks by isolating threats from reaching endpoint devices, such as desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Their endpoint-focused approach creates peace of mind for clients that have a diversified operation.
3. Proofpoint Reduces Risk with User-Focused Email Protection
Proofpoint changes the game for email protection preventing email fraud and ransomware attacks, phishing, data loss, and more. Proofpoint is people-focused, exploring how end users play a role in today’s cyberthreats. Their user-focused approach provides peace of mind for clients unfamiliar with how their behavior can impact their business, garnering the security they need so they can focus on growing their business.
4. Veeam Reduces Risk and Ensures Business Resilience with Data Protection
Veeam offers hybrid and multicloud backup and replication to ensure business resiliency. It protects your data from malicious actors and eliminates data loss and downtime. Veeam enables MSPs to help organizations evolve the way they manage data and ensures data is available across any cloud infrastructure, so they can make the move to the cloud in a secure fashion.
5. Wasabi Reduces Risk with Durable, Bottomless Data Storage
Wasabi makes cloud data storage simple, fast, and secure, giving partners the peace of mind to grow their businesses. Wasabi offers ransomware protection, data durability, and immutable, bottomless storage. Wasabi backs their data with off-site disaster recovery, an active data archive, and the option for long-term storage. Wasabi helps you ensure your clients feel secure that their data stays protected from cyberthreats.
Pulling It All Together
With the guiding principles of resilience, recovery, and contingency in place, plus offering these five business continuity solutions, you can minimize your clients’ downtime and grow your business as a trusted MSP. Visit the Pax8 Marketplace to get started.
