Here’s why the cloud plays an essential role in planning for the worst.
Far too many businesses have an inadequate or nonexistent business continuity plan. Although most MSPs offer business continuity planning, they don’t always account for the many types of scenarios that can occur. Typically, they account for things like major storms, power outages, and other natural disasters. If the coronavirus pandemic made anything clear, it’s that business continuity planning needs to be modernized to account for all types of scenarios – above and beyond the typical natural disasters that happen from time to time.
Now we’re not saying that accounting for small-scale emergencies isn’t important, but if your business continuity plan relies on face-to-face interaction wherein you’re guiding your clients through the process or details written out in a binder somewhere in the office, it’s simply not enough. Business continuity planning needs to enable your clients to access everything they need in a moment’s notice from any location, including:
- Line of business applications
- Productivity suites for word processing, spreadsheets, email, etc.
- Desktops in the office, including all settings and applicable permissions
- Business telephones, including their work line, extensions, etc.
- Documents and files
- And much, much more
The cloud is essential to modernizing business continuity planning…
If you’re not leveraging the cloud as part of your clients business continuity plans, it’s time to start. The cloud allows for:
- Quick deployment capabilities that ensure the resources required are up and running within a few minutes.
- Greater uptime as you can leverage data centers with built-in generators and redundancies in place with automatic failover to avoid outages.
- Stronger security with built-in measures, such as around-the-clock monitoring, enterprise-grade encryption, multi-factor authentication, and much more.
- More reliability as all applications and systems are updated on a regular basis with the latest patches, upgrades, and features, even if clients are working from home.
In addition to leveraging the cloud in your clients’ business continuity plans, it’s important to make sure they’re well trained on how to use those cloud systems well in advance. This should involve training ahead of time, and in some cases, creating video recordings showcasing how to use the solution so they can be distributed in the event of an emergency.
How can you start leveraging the cloud in your clients’ business continuity plans?
CPU offers cloud services for MSPs looking to assist their clients with business continuity planning that accounts for ALL scenarios. You can resell our cloud service as a stand-alone service or bundled into your managed services plan at an added cost. How does it work? It’s simple… We provide the service at a discount, and you resell it as needed.
CPU has staff, engineers, and partners all over the world and have had 100% remote capabilities for years because of the cloud. Contact us now to find out more about our cloud partner program.
