The Role of Specialized Managed Services for Backup and Recovery in IT

When it comes to specialized managed services for backup and recovery, the relationship between the managed services provider (MSP) and the customer is relatively straightforward. In this setup, the customer provides the hardware or software, and the MSP team manages it remotely.

In some scenarios, customers take a hands-off approach, allowing the MSP to take full responsibility for the backup environment. This means the MSP makes all decisions related to the environment, such as adding new backups, removing existing ones, troubleshooting failures and monitoring capacity. Others remain more involved and prefer an MSP to supplement their existing workforce, only asking the MSP for assistance as needed.

Ultimately, MSPs like CDW are technically advanced and can manage a customer's backup environment based on specific roles and responsibilities outlined in a managed services for backup and recovery agreement. Their role is crucial, so let’s explore three reasons why selecting a well-equipped, vendor-agnostic MSP for backup and recovery is essential.

1. MSPs have expertise in multiple platforms and access to extensive resources.

Let’s say you’re ready to explore new backup and recovery technologies for your organization. There are easily a dozen available options, such as Commvault, Rubrik, Veritas, Cohesity, Veeam— the list goes on. Achieving a solid understanding of each backup solution and finding the best one for your business would take incredible amounts of time and resources before you even get around to crunching numbers.

A superior MSP supports all major players within the backup and recovery space, and holds advanced engineering certifications within any of those technology sets to provide 24/7 support.

Speaking of 24/7 support, what happens when your business isn’t open? Is someone actively monitoring your backup and recovery and able to provide support when things go wrong? Ask any potential MSP you’re considering about their onshore and offshore resources and the focus area of the engineers assigned to manage your backup and recovery. As a leading MSP, CDW has global expertise, which allows us to provide a mix of onshore and offshore engineers.

Regarding backup and recovery, it’s not uncommon to find storage resources moonlighting as backup resources or converged experts also responsible for backup. CDW’s backup and recovery experts are not shared resources. They are focused on being experts in backup and recovery support, allowing us to provide a very high level of engagement, customer service and technical outputs to meet our customers’ needs.

2. MSPs minimize common backup mistakes.

When onboarding a customer, an MSP should undergo a formal transition process that includes a health assessment to examine the environment in its current state. As part of CDW’s managed services for backup and recovery health assessment, we provide you with a list of broken items and specific recommendations for remediation.

The findings during the transition process can surprise some IT teams. The truth is that they are sometimes unaware that things aren’t working because they’re not as dialed into what’s happening within the software or the support — hence, the upside to utilizing an experienced MSP.

Unfortunately, when things aren’t working properly, overall efficiency and optimization decline. This is where MSPs really shine. They provide recommendations on how to improve your environment's optimization and efficiency, and they provide post-go-live support that can include anything from capacity and tuning upgrades to reconfiguration.

Some IT teams can handle software effectively, but when it comes to optimization and implementing best practices, an MSP can provide guidance in areas that customers lacking expertise in backup and recovery may not recognize.

3. MSPs emphasize efficient backup and recovery support for businesses facing cybersecurity threats.

It’s commonplace to hear IT teams discuss how it’s not a matter of if but when your business will be compromised due to the growing number of sophisticated infiltrators. This is why CDW conducts environment health assessments and focuses on both backup and the assistance component when recoveries are required, ensuring the smallest recovery point objectives possible.

According to the Harvard Business Review’s article, “Why Data Breeches Spiked in 2023”, there are three primary reasons behind the increased theft of personal data, and cloud misconfiguration is one of them. “In 2023, over 80% of data breaches involved data stored in the cloud,” the article reports. “That is not just because the cloud is an attractive target. In many cases, it is also an easy target due to cloud misconfiguration — that is, companies unintentionally misuse the cloud, such as allowing excessively permissive cloud access, having unrestricted ports and using unsecured backups.”

An MSP backup support model should happen in a very formalized fashion that is well-automated, leverages things like AI as much as possible, and is structured in a repeatable and sustainable way. When vetting an MSP, ask them about their standard operating procedure for recovery support and automation capabilities. When you can leverage a good amount of automation, you minimize the risk and make processes easily repeatable.

While backup might not be the flashiest aspect of IT, it requires significant time and resources. By engaging an MSP for your backup needs, you can free up your IT team to focus on higher-profile technology considerations, like deploying transformational project initiatives. Rather than treating backup as an afterthought, an experienced MSP can support your IT team, either partially or entirely, to suit your business’s backup and recovery needs.

Most MSPs offer a reactive support model, but at CDW, we integrate backup software with our internal support portal so that if a backup job fails, a ticket is generated in our system. The ticket is then routed to our team based on the severity of the failure, and we take the lead in remediating that backup failure, keeping your IT resources on other priorities. We also produce reports on a daily, weekly and monthly basis on job activities, and our goal is to be the first line of defense in addressing backup failures before the next job runs.

Sometimes, we may turn to you for assistance, such as when a failure occurs because the virtual machine (VM) is offline. In this instance, we’d need you to confirm if something no longer needs to be backed up, if it needs to be decommissioned, or if the VM powered off inadvertently and when it will be turned back on so the backup can run.

While some coordination is required in specific circumstances, we lead that charge. When you engage an MSP, you shouldn’t have to figure out what failed and ask for it to be fixed. We log into environments proactively every day. Even if we don’t get alerts, we understand that no one wants to find out the hard way they haven’t received tickets for the past three days because an alerting component was broken, which is why we conduct daily health checks.

In addition, we make sure to review capacity and efficiencies. For example, we assess whether you’re running low on space anywhere and if things are taking longer to run. Say a job should take 15 minutes and now takes two hours; we determine whether there is something from a tuning and performance perspective that we must monitor and potentially make recommendations on.

CDW’s proactive approach aims to provide you with peace of mind, allowing you to step away from backup concerns and trust that we are diligently managing their environment. Our support model is designed to leave you feeling confident that your environment is in better shape than before.

CDW can offer comprehensive managed services for your backup and recovery needs. To learn more about how CDW Managed Services can support your organization, visit our webpage or call 800-800-4239.