MSPs: 4 Ways to Help Your ROBO Customers Protect Their Data

MSPs that support their customers’ remote/branch office (ROBO) environments face all kinds of challenges. Keeping ROBO environments—the network edge—secure from ransomware and other cybersecurity threats isn’t easy. These offices are typically far from the IT teams that support them and rarely have any technical staff on hand. Then there are the nearly 305 million ransomware attacks that occurred in the first half of 2021. Add it all up and, for MSPs, that spells opportunity.

So, what are the best ways you can help your customers protect their data? Here are some tips that translate into products and services that can generate new MSP revenue streams.

1.    Start With Prevention

Your customers count on you to provide them with the right technologies and services to meet their needs. One opportunity that more and more MSPs see is employee training. Educating your customers’ employees to do their part to stop ransomware and other cyberattacks is a great entry point with new customers and a potential new revenue stream from existing customers.

Remote and branch office employees must understand their essential role in preventing ransomware. Teaching them how to spot risky emails and phishing scams is a valuable service you can offer as an MSP. It should also go without saying that you need to make sure your customers’ have effective firewalls, spam filters, antimalware, and antivirus tools in place everywhere, and all software is patched and up to date. You also need to work with your customers to develop a remote backup and recovery strategy that establishes recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs) for each ROBO location. Those metrics will drive your recommendations for backup and recovery solutions.

2.    Deliver Cloud-Based Centralized Backup and Disaster Recovery Management

If any of your customers can’t access their infrastructure for any reason—say, a hurricane strikes the region, for example—onsite backups aren’t of any use. That’s why it’s essential that you offer centralized, self-service management for all backup and disaster recovery processes, accessible from anywhere via a web browser.

3.    Implement Local Backups with Direct-to-Cloud Protection

Most of your customers’ organizations that store data at ROBO locations have good reasons for doing so, including speed, cost, and efficiency. But without onsite staff, backing up ROBO data can be challenging. That’s where StorageCraft OneXafe Solo changes everything. Built for simpler environments, OneXafe Solo is a plug-and-play data protection appliance in a small form factor that streams data directly to StorageCraft Cloud Services, ensuring business continuity. OneXafe Solo uses StorageCraft OneSystem for cloud-based management from anywhere. For MSPs, OneXafe Solo doesn’t even require a ROBO site visit. Your customers simply plug it in, connect it to the internet, and start protecting their data in minutes.   

4.    Offer DRaaS for 99.999 Percent Uptime

When businesses with ROBO locations goes down, your customers start losing money—fast. Panic can quickly set in. ROBO businesses depend on data to keep things moving, so uptime matters now more than ever. By offering StorageCraft Cloud Services disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), your customers can count on 99.999 percent uptime. You’ll be the hero if any of your customers ever do suffer a data disaster because StorageCraft Cloud Services include everything from file and folder recovery to instant failover of a customer’s entire site and network.

Become a StorageCraft Partner

Offering a portfolio of proven technologies is one key to your success as an MSP. StorageCraft, an Arcserve company, offers you the broadest portfolio of data protection and management solutions available under one roof. By becoming a StorageCraft partner, you can stand out from the competition, add new revenue streams, and win your customers’ loyalty and trust.