With Cloud Hosted Services becoming quite popular with Small and Medium (SMB) sized companies, IT Managed Service Providers (MSP's) find that the onus of keeping servers and backing up data no longer drops with them, but instead with the Cloud Vendor.
Take Hosted Exchange for instance - a service like Microsoft Office 365 has zero Microsoft Exchange care demands, and all info is backed up and stored securely in a Microsoft Datacentre.
Or is it? Microsoft are not alone in suffering outages for their Cloud Hosted services, and for many MSP's thoughts have turned to how they are able to supplement the Cloud Service providers copies with their own systems of back-up and redundancy.
Adding such services can be a real value add for a client in an industry where margins on Cloud Services are typically lean.
Here are 4 areas your IT Support business can help your customers back-up the Cloud.
E Mail Continuity
EMail is core to several clients businesses, and so ensuring that e-mail continues to flow when a Cloud Service is experiencing an outage is a belt and braces approach that numerous clients would be interested in. Also, the bog standard email security products that are provided with many Cloud Services means that Spam and false positives, or legitimate emails erroneously marked as junk, can still be a problem.
The remedy lies in providing both redundancy and a better score of junk filtering, using best of breed products for e-mail filtering.
By redirecting the clients MX record within DNS to a 3rd Party e-mail filtering product like GFI Max Mail or Exchange Defender, and then configuring that service to deliver e mail to the Cloud Hosted service, your customer gains the benefit of better email security, plus a 2nd Web Portal to visit should the Cloud Hosted e-mail service suffer an outage.
Moreover, such email filtering services usually also offer you the choice to archive off emails - helping your customer achieve both internal and regulatory standards, whilst adding another recurring revenue source to your MSP business.
Web-Sites
Beyond email, a clients web-site is frequently one of their most significant Cloud Hosted services, and one of their most vulnerable. Many a smaller MSP will re tell a story of how their clients Web-Site was hacked and ended up displaying a Political driven message or worse. A service for example CodeGuard ensures that your clients website is consistently and automatically backed up, so that in the event of a breach or accident that takes a web-site off line, you can very quickly restore your clients web-site back to its former state.
Social Media
Similarly, Cloud service Backupify enables users to automatically copy other Cloud Hosted services for example GoogleMail, Flickr, Facebook (including firm fanpages) and even Twitter - ensuring that in the event the Cloud Service provider loses data, or even in the event the user accidentally ruins their own information, a back-up is available for restoration.
Data Backup
Another service that is gaining popularity is Managed On line Backup. These services could be as easy or as complex as your customer needs. In this model, backups of essential records and other info take place automatically according to a schedule to a cloud data-centre. The attractiveness of this kind of service is the fact that a great Managed Online Backup service allows you to schedule backups at downtimes, including after office hours.
Where automatic backup isn't possible, MSP's can also help their clients backup Cloud Service data on a manual basis. OnLine Accounting and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) services frequently provide the facility to export data to a single file for backup purposes - and so the MSP can set a recurring ticket within their Professional Services Automation (PSA) or CRM tool to make sure that either they or the client download this data and store it in a secure location, be it on site, or with another Cloud Backup software.
Judgment
No matter the Cloud Services your client uses, as an MSP you have both an obligation and an opportunity to treat these services like an on-site service - ensuring that the data is backed up regularly.
Not relying on the Cloud Vendor for backups means that in the event of a problem, your customer has peace-of-mind that you're there to look out for them.
CRA is an IT consulting firm in NYC.
