Memo to MSPs: Are Your Customers Holiday-Ready?

With the holiday season in full swing, there will be a lot of preparation in the coming weeks. Getting the house ready for guests, setting up the tree, the decorations, buying gifts for the kids, etc. If you’re an MSP, you are going through your own seasonal preparations, ensuring both you and your customers business operations are holiday-ready.

Depending on your location, harsh winter weather complicates things for many businesses (and the MSPs they rely on). For example, Pennsylvania-based MSP Penn Systems Group’s customers are highly vulnerable to holiday business interruptions due to power failures from severe weather that has become commonplace. In 2014, after an ice storm knocked out power in the area for two days, Penn had to deal with a client’s system issues as well as their own. Luckily, they had prepared for this situation. Thanks to their backup in the Datto cloud, Penn was able to manage the data remotely and keep their customer’s business up and running, despite the outage.

It’s not just snow and ice you have to worry about. In 2013, Calgary-based IT service provider XCEL Professional Services’ clients’ business operations were threatened by a massive flood that devastated much of the downtown area. The flood initiated an enormous increase in awareness of the importance of disaster recovery needs for all of XCEL’s customers, particularly with the technology needed to run day-to-day operations.

Another holiday concern for businesses - cyber attacks. After all, tis the season of shopping. This year more than ever, employees are taking advantage of e-commerce convenience and accessing unvetted, often unsecure websites from work. A surefire way to ensure a business can survive a cyber attack is by implementing a BCDR solution. This was what saved managed service provider US Computer Connection’s client when they contracted CryptoLocker, the legendary ransomware trojan. Thanks to having implemented Datto, the MSP was able to get their customer’s business back up and running in less than an hour, avoiding extended downtime. While you may not be able to prevent an attack, with a proper solution in place, you’ll be able to restore back any corrupted data and avoid paying a hefty ransom.

The bottom line is, you need to help keep your clients protected. Perhaps educating them on some proper tips to avoid malware is your best approach. If you’re looking for a little extra help when it comes to preparing and educating clients, then look no further. With Datto’s Ultimate Disaster Recovery Checklist, we have everything you need in one, convenient place. When it comes to BCDR, one of your greatest assets is proper planning. This checklist will help make things a little more simple.