Backup and Disaster Recovery as a Managed Service

Backup and disaster recovery is the service clients resent paying for, right up until the day it saves their business. Then it becomes the reason they never leave. That asymmetry, low perceived value until catastrophe, then total dependence, is exactly what makes BCDR one of the most important services an MSP can deliver and one of the most poorly understood. Most failures in this space are not failures of backup; they are failures of recovery, and understanding the difference is what separates an MSP that protects clients from one that merely stores their data.

Backup Is Not Recovery

The most dangerous misconception in this space is that having backups means you are protected. Backup is a copy of your data; disaster recovery is the ability to actually resume operations after an outage. Those are not the same thing. A business can have months of backups and still be down for days if the restore process is slow, untested, or incomplete.

True BCDR includes the plan, the infrastructure, and the tested process to bring systems back within an acceptable timeframe. MSPs that sell backups without recovery planning leave clients exposed at the exact moment protection matters most. The product you are really selling is not storage; it is the confidence that the business can be running again quickly, which is a far more valuable and defensible thing to own.

RTO, RPO, and Designing the Plan

A real disaster recovery plan starts with two numbers. RTO, the recovery time objective, is how quickly systems must be back after an incident. RPO, the recovery point objective, is how much data loss is acceptable, measured as the time between backups. A business with a four-hour RTO and a one-hour RPO needs frequent backups and fast recovery infrastructure; one that can tolerate a day of downtime needs far less.

Defining RTO and RPO per client is the foundation of both the design and the price, because tighter objectives require more infrastructure and cost more. This is where a disaster recovery readiness assessment earns its place: it surfaces where a client current setup would fail to meet the recovery they assume they have, turning a vague worry into a specific, sellable gap. The assessment is also the natural follow-on to any cloud migration, since a new environment needs a recovery plan designed for it.

Ransomware, Testing, and Recurring Value

Ransomware has turned backup and disaster recovery from a best practice into a necessity. Tested, isolated backups are the single most effective ransomware defense because they let a business restore rather than pay. Sophos and other industry research show a large share of organizations are hit each year, and the ones that recover fastest are those with immutable, off-site, regularly tested backups.

The key word is tested. An untested backup discovered to be incomplete during an attack is worse than no plan at all, because it traded real protection for false confidence. Regular restore testing verifies the backups are complete, the recovery process works, and the RTO is achievable in practice, and documented DR tests double as a powerful trust signal to show clients in business reviews. Priced per device or workload as a recurring monthly fee, BCDR becomes durable revenue that strengthens both your recurring base and the security posture clients increasingly demand.