Reselling Disaster Recovery? Start By Asking These 12 Questions

One of the best ways to introduce your MSP customers to the cloud is to implement cloud-based backup or disaster recovery infrastructure. As we have previously explained here on the blog, DR is an easy first step into the cloud and can in fact be used to migrate entire applications to cloud as the primary infrastructure.

Disaster Recovery as a Service is a solid avenue to add recurring revenue to your bottom line, then, and it also provides peace of mind for your customers, as they know their data and systems will be accessible even if their primary servers go down.

The first step to selling a disaster recovery plan is the discovery step. Use these twelve questions to learn the needs of your customers and what kind of service level they will need for their DR.

Setting Expectations

You should start by probing any current backup and/or disaster recovery plans, as well as the customer’s general attitude and expectations around DR. This can help you determine if they are a good fit or if they may be a difficult customer at a later date. It can also help you demonstrate expertise as you describe how they might be able to improve.

1. Have you ever encountered data loss or data corruption for any reason? What happened?
2. How would unexpected downtime impact your daily business operations?
3. What systems are absolutely critical to keep online?
4. How would the loss of some or all of your data affect your daily operations?
5. As it stands today, how do you protect your data, both in terms of accessibility and security?
6. What do you expect from a disaster recovery plan?