How Much Priority Can an MSP Give Your Backups?

We love managed service providers (MSPs). They fill a huge void for companies with limited IT resources. But at what point does the MSP start having limited resources too? MSPs, just like fully staffed IT departments, run into the same problem of getting really busy with several competing priorities throughout the day and don’t typically have a staff dedicated specifically to monitoring backups.

With the rapidly growing number of ransomware attacks and the need to have 24/7 access to their data, businesses must focus even more on backup & disaster recovery. Because even with the best endpoint protection out there, you’re still vulnerable. Backups are your last line of defense.

So, how many times have you personally had to put the backups aside because something higher priority came up. Maybe the CEO’s email quit syncing to his or her phone? Or a workstation crashed, or the internet goes down and your phones are out.

It happens often, and we know this because our company was spun-off from an all- encompassing MSP where there was simply a limit on manpower. Usually the tech was assigned a customer’s account and they would manage every single aspect of their customer’s IT, so there were still a lot of those competing priorities for them.  It’s not that the techs were lazy or didn’t want to be proactive, but with all the different things they were responsible for, they only had time to look for backup failures.  This unfortunately leaves several things out of the picture, such as, did the backups run at all?  We’ve witnessed several situations where there were backups that were hung and thus not running, but because of the hung state, they weren’t failing either.  Some backup management systems are smart enough to alert you to the fact that there has been some span of time since the last backup, but on others, you would have to notice that yourself.  Also, what if you had backups that you thought were good, but actually weren’t?  What processes or technologies do you have in place to ensure that what the system says are good backups, actually are?  In many cases with a standard MSP, these are questions that often never get asked, much less answered.

At ThinkGard all we do is data protection as a service and we keep our backup techs separate from our security!  Every bit of our energy goes into monitoring so that your backups and security are given the attention they need every single day. In fact, many of our customers already have a complete IT staff in place but find it easier to sleep at night or go on vacation knowing that when a disaster happens, whether ransomware, fire, flood or wind related, they’re covered. We even write and test their DR plans so in a break the glass emergency scenario, they have documentation in place for the process of recovering their data.

If you’ve ever considered using a managed service provider for your data backups or security, consider using one where Total Data Security is their specialty.