Cloud providers have Service Licensing Agreements (SLAs), which will deliver varying levels of failover support. As an MSP facilitating such services for your clients, it’s imperative that you have the right information in this area. A lot of sales people are going to vet the cloud when questions are asked about Internet losses by saying cloud failover is so good, if a loss of this kind occurs, things will be repaired so fast those experiencing the downtime won’t even be aware of it.
While this is entirely possible, depending on the SLA involved, it may not be strictly true, and that can end up looking really bad for your MSP. The upshot of the deal is this: There isn’t always an official SLA from a cloud provider regarding such situations because they don’t happen very often (also a good sales point). An additional reason SLAs aren’t always formed is the focus of cloud providers. Often this focus aims itself at discovering underlying issues behind a network implosion, rather than having a prepared backup “image” for launch. A discussion with your cloud providers can help redirect their approach in such scenarios, which really will facilitate quicker failover recovery.
Failover Without Backup Contingencies
Should such an exigency knock things off line “cold turkey,” you’re looking at 20 minutes to an hour for relaunch. With a prepared backup image, rebooting will go much more quickly. But selling clients on failover security when no backup image has been prepared, and no SLA has been put into action, is selling clients a bill of goods. When they then must eventually experience between 20 minutes and an hour of downtime, it’s possible you’ve lost said client.
The best solution is to be proactive. Strategize with cloud providers before downtime issues arise with existing MSP clients, or ones you’re in the process of acquiring. Figure out an SLA specifying protocols and ensure when these scenarios do arise— with the technology world, it’s not a matter of “if,” but “when”— clients are able to experience as little downtime as possible. If you can work with the cloud services being funneled through your MSP to clients such that there really is no downtime, and you’ve got an SLA to back that up, what a selling point this becomes.
Exceptional Potential
The potential for continuous, secure operations under the cloud is exceptional. This becomes a good sales point when you realize that individual options can be tailored per client— and oftentimes have to be.
When a client has a tailor-made computing system with an SLA that directly concerns their needs, they’re more likely to retain the MSP that made that happen for a while. By arranging SLAs with cloud provision services beforehand, you can increase the number of things your MSP is able to sell prospective clients securely, meaning you’ll have a better chance at acquiring better customers and keeping them throughout the long haul.
When you’ve gotten to a point where this is happening regularly, you can start using other cost-effective sales techniques. One gaining in popularity today has to do with the “office-less office.” Basically, anywhere there is an Internet connection, cloud computing ability can be tapped into, right? The only limitation on provided cloud service is the Internet connectivity in a given area. Well, what’s more expensive? Ensuring individual employees have Internet connectivity, or paying rent on one floor of a downtown sky-rise? How much do your clients pay on a monthly basis for office space? There is a distinct possibility that this number is in the tens of thousands, and that most of the work done by employees doesn’t strictly require one building or another. When cloud computing surrogates a system of databases, all employees need is access and they can work as efficiently from home as from anywhere else.
Cloud computing can facilitate savings in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, when properly applied with trustworthy SLAs.
Maximizing Sales
As an MSP, you need to keep all clients you acquire. Cloud providers are quickly becoming representative of an MSP’s ability to provide services, so you want to ensure you don’t over or under sell the provider you’re using. Ensure that what you sell is what can be provided.
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from MSP SEO Factory.
