The Cloud as a Tool: Moving Beyond Backup

In the second installment of a three-part series for Doyenz, IT expert and author Karl Palachuk writes about how cloud computing is enabling IT consultants to offer new recovery services to small businesses. Read the first article on business continuity planning for the SMB market here. 

Backup has played a major role in getting many businesses (and I.T. consultants) introduced to the cloud. Backups are extremely important. In some ways, they’re the most fundamental service we offer to clients—the prospect of staying in business when something goes horribly wrong.

But cloud backups are just the beginning. The cloud offers so much more. Cloud backups are basically data storage. Once you have a cloud backup in place, you can offer additional security and services to your clients. In other words, cloud backups make possible a whole new set of service offerings.

For small businesses, moving backup to the cloud represents moving a mission critical function from in-house to a cloud service. But more importantly, backups are better in the cloud than they are locally. Cloud backups don’t rely on clients to perform a task in order to be successful (like switching tapes or hard drives).

Once you move an image of your systems into the Cloud, you can take advantage of the benefits of virtualization. And that brings a whole new set of services to sell your clients. Let’s wrap the rest of this discussion inside a box called Reduced Downtime. How do cloud-based backups and virtual services result in reduced downtime? Here are three key ways:

Reduced Impact on Clients

First, the backup itself goes disc-to-disc in real time, and then up to the cloud as scheduled. So the client is never affected by a CPU-intensive backup during working hours. No one will ever stop a backup or reboot the server just to speed it up because of backup.

Virtual Lab in the Cloud

Second, with the right backup solution, you can now spin up your servers into a virtual environment to test patches, fixes, and updates. You avoid downtime because these operations take place in the virtual environment. So no matter how many reboots are done, you can do it all during normal business hours (when vendor support is available) without affecting the client.

Once your testing is complete, you can implement the changes in the physical world. Alternatively, you can implement the upgrades into the virtual environment and then bring it back down into the physical environment. The key advantage for you here is the flexibility to do what makes the most sense for your client.

Disaster Recovery in the Cloud

Third, you can use the virtual environment for disaster recovery. In case the client’s office has a power outage, fire, flood, etc., you can start up their server in the virtual environment until the client’s physical environment is usable again. This is a level of reduced downtime that smaller clients have never been able to afford before cloud services.

When you go to your clients with a vision statement about their future network, you can now put a huge emphasis on a bright new future with an emphasis on less downtime. You can literally promise that, from this day forward, their network will have less downtime. That’s a pretty amazing promise. So if you’re looking for a great differentiator for your services, promise your clients uptime and productivity! 

Karl W. Palachuk is the Senior Systems Engineer at America's Tech Support. He is the author of nine books and the owner of multiple businesses. His books include Managed Services in a Month and The Network Documentation Workbook. Karl is a frequent trainer and speaker in the SMB Community. His popular blogs can be found at SmallBizThoughts.com and CloudServicesRoundtable.com.