Abbott and Costello. Jordan and Pippen. Rum and Coke.

Some of the best productive forces on the planet stem from a partnership that’s fostered over time and honed to perfection. Without “who’s on second”, there could be no, “no, he’s on first.” And without Bacardi, there could be no Cuba Libre.

So too is it with MSPs and their vendors. A managed service is only successful if the service provider and the software developer/vendor have a strong partnership and a mutual commitment for support. If an end-user comes to the software developer looking to use the service, that vendor should refer the end-user to one of their managed service partners. In turn, the MSP should talk up the vendor to other MSPs interested in offering that service to a different market.

When MSPs seek out vendors, they should consider all aspects of the business – is this a company I could work closely with to get the most out of our partnership? Is their support team available if I have unanswerable questions? Will they work to support me or just collect my money?

The product could be outstanding, but the team behind it is just as important. Ensure your service provider has a superb relationship with their vendors.

Tape has served the world well. There was a time and place when tape made sense. It was a great way to make data transportable at a reasonable cost. It was the foundation of data backup and recovery. It allowed us to make our own music mixes and listen to them in our living rooms and cars. But now tape has seen its day. The music industry has eliminated tape from its inventory. We know that cassette could only be listened to so many times before the quality of the music began to degrade. The video industry is quickly eliminating tape also. No more fuzzy lines on the screen. Disc has quickly replaced these two industry’s media of choice with good reason. Quality! So, why oh why do we still treat our precious data as such a second-class piece of data?

Tedious. It takes a lot of time to manage, store, retrieve and recover from tape. Regular tape rotation, labels, indexes, manual labor are all basic parts of regular tape backup practices. To help ensure the quality of the tape backup, a test restore is recommended on every tape before it leaves the building.

Accident-Prone. We all agree that there is nothing glamorous about backing up data. No one really loves doing it; in fact most people don’t even like it being their responsibility. More often than not tending to the backup tape is the first thing skipped to address ‘more important things’ in the day. Once this neglect begins, the responsibility is then usually passed down to someone less senior and less technical who knows even less about the importance of the backup, and has no way of knowing its success rate. From there the tape either ends up sitting in the back of someone’s car for weeks on end or worse, sitting right on top of the server.

Pollution. That’s right, tape is environmentally unfriendly. Tape vendors recommend you rotate out your tapes at least yearly. Once they are used they lose their value to the point that their only destination is the landfill. For proper backup protection, after the tape has been written, the tape should be transported off-site for safe keeping. This is usually done by a fuel inefficient vehicle, generally left idling for hours on end during pickups and drop offs polluting the air. Once at the off-site facility, it is stored in a large building that uses vast amounts of energy to help ensure the tape lives at a steady climate. All the while, no one is really sure there is even any recoverable data on that tape to begin with.

Expensive. Don’t be fooled by tape manufacturers’ claims that they have the lowest costs: they are not painting the full picture. They don’t include the cost of the tape drives, libraries, maintenance and support, higher rate of down time, backup software, maintenance and support, training, failure response, personnel coverage during vacation, off-site storage vendor, emergency retrievals…the list can keep going.

Tape has served us well and helped us establish the portability of information in many industries but as the music and video industries have easily shown, there are much better, more reliable solutions available now to overcome all of these tape turn-offs. And for those of you who doubt me, I’m sure my iTunes library (which I can instantly access and listen to anywhere) trumps your cassette tapes…once we get back to your house and listen to them on your GE tape player.

The last two years have been tough for all of us.  As the economy entered a dismal downspin of epic proportions, corporate America performed magic to keep their heads above water.  Senior management has been forced to work smarter and leaner and has exhausted belt tightening tricks to maintain the bottom line.  Those money saving measures have included reducing headcount and taking a scalpel to all departments.  Working lean and mean is the new norm.

In this new era of corporate conservatism, I am urging you, in fact begging you, to upsize your backup in your downsized world.  Backup is the disciplined process of protecting your mission critical data on a daily or continual basis and securing it in a remote site.  Your business survival and prosperity depends on mission critical data and the loss of that data could bring financial harm to you, your company and your customers. 

I would like to share EIGHT REASONS you really need to enhance your backup now:

1.      Your staff is smaller today and you may have laid off the guy who does the backup.  If you didn’t, he is probably too busy to do this every single day without fail.

2.     You riffed Henry after twelve years in the accounting department.  If Henry took it hard he may have deleted accounts receivables as you escorted him out the door.

3.     You fired your tape courier (just too expensive) and now Madeline takes the tape home.  A really bad idea and unfair to Madeline.

4.     You cancelled the maintenance contract on the tape drives to save money and they are unreliable.

5.     You keep the tapes beyond their useful life.  Of course you don’t know that they failed until you try to restore data…WHOOPS.

6.     Morale suffers when people are overworked and the staff gets careless.

7.     Recovery tests that are supposed to be performed twice per year don’t get done at all.  There just isn’t time anymore.   

8.     We become firefighters instead of fire preventers and important things like backup fall through the cracks.

I am not trying to frighten you (well maybe just a little) but stuff happens and data loss or destruction can have a devastating and lasting impact on your business. 

BUT THERE IS GOOD NEWS.  The cost of online data backup has decreased by over 50% in the past three years.  Storage and bandwidth costs have been the major drivers of this reduction but technology and the emergence of the cloud have contributed in a major way as well to this new affordability.  In fact, in companies with multiple servers in different locations, online backup costs less than traditional tape backup and offsite storage.

But this is not about money, it is about survival.  Effective, secure, disciplined data backup is not a luxury it is an absolute necessity.  You and many others in your business have worked very hard over many years to build a great company that brings value to its customers and clients.  Make sure that value doesn’t disappear in the middle of the night.