Disaster Planning for MSPs
BY IT GLUE | April 03, 2020
Disasters are catastrophic events that will impact both your MSP and your clients. Some disasters are reasonably predictable, for example hurricanes in Florida, tornadoes in Kansas, and so on. Other disasters are universal, for example fires and floods can occur almost anywhere. Godzilla mostly attacks Tokyo, but these days you never know. The point is that you should have a plan for the disaster scenarios that you can reasonably expect to face.
Disasters Impact Everything
Disasters affect every aspect of your business, and present significant challenges to business continuity. First, you have to prepare for the complete destruction of your premises. How long would it take to get your team back and running if that happened? Are they equipped to work remotely? Do you rely on physical backup, or is there a SaaS backup failover as well? If you could get your team working quickly again, would they have access to the information that they need?
Prepare to Help Your Clients
If your clients are also affected, how prepared are you to help? This may be a matter of assessing your ability to visit client sites and work with them to restore key data and systems. You might have to set up entire clients on remote work at a moment’s notice—and you might have to do this at the same time you’re facing the impact of the same disaster.
Managing the Financial Impact
Then there’s the financial impact of a disaster. If your clients can’t pay—and let’s face it, money isn’t the biggest thing for anybody to worry about in the aftermath of disaster—you need to find ways to make that work. Work with vendors who are willing to help you, because that’s going to put you in a better position to help your customers and community. But also have a disaster fund, even if to bridge the gap until an insurance payout arrives.
To fail to plan is to plan to fail. The odds of a Godzilla attack are admittedly quite low, but fires, floods and other natural disasters are all pretty common scenarios any business could face, and should have a plan for. It’s the only way to ensure that you don’t lose everything when disaster strikes.
To learn more about business continuity planning, we’ve put together an in-depth e-book on the topic. Download it now to get started.
