Businesses want cloud migrations to be easy, simple, and straightforward. In reality, cloud migrations take a lot more work and planning to fully benefit your customers. An area that deserves significant attention is redundancy. Moving data or business processes to the cloud does not automatically equal redundancy, so it is important to educate businesses on how it protects their processes.
Cloud Computing and Redundancy
More and more businesses are seeing the value of migrating core services to the cloud. This value is real: cloud computing serves as a viable solution for a wide range of business processes and IT infrastructure. Migrating to the cloud can save money, increase uptime and reliability, and enable massive scalability to a degree that businesses just a few years ago couldn’t have dreamed of.
Cloud computing naturally provides value in terms of redundancy. When the data of your customers lives somewhere else, you gain the ability to relaunch their business even after the most disastrous of circumstances. Compare that to an on-premises strategy, where you’d then need to concern yourself with on-site and off-site backups.
There’s one big caveat here, though: the redundancy plan of your customers is only as strong as their cloud strategy and chosen cloud partners. The solution to the risks of the cloud is remarkably similar to the solution to the risks of on-premises: building redundant systems with a solid framework.
Communicating Redundancy to your Customers
As an MSP, it is crucial that you educate your customers on the risks of flimsy redundancy practices. If the cloud data and infrastructure of a business is not itself built in a redundant way, they are opened up to all the same risks as on-premises without off-site backup.
Some redundancy is built in depending on certain cloud partners. What’s more, most datacenters and cloud solutions providers are already set up with some degree of redundancy. Customers need to understand that while building redundancy takes more time in a cloud migration, it provides a necessary safeguard to all of their processes. Put simply, they can’t stay fully protected without it.
What are some specific ways to explain the necessity of cloud redundancy to your customers?
- Educate your customers before and during the migration process. Clearly communicating the value of effective redundancy to their business is vital, as it lets them know that they will be much more protected in the long run.
- Reference real risks that occur within businesses every day and explain how redundancy combats them. Businesses face the risk of internet outages while operating in the cloud, and an unfortunately timed outage can cripple a business: redundant internet gives your clients a backup internet connection that kicks in when their primary connection is disrupted. Being able to point out solutions such as this to your customers speaks to the credibility of redundancy.
- Emphasize convenience. In today’s world, having servers go offline can cause massive dents in business productivity and profitability. Wouldn’t it be preferable to build redundant systems out of the gate and not have to worry about an outage bringing your business to a halt? Let your customers know that the protection provided by redundant solutions is worth the wait.
Cloud adoption is the way of the future, and businesses big and small deserve the very best offerings in the field from their MSP of choice. It’s time to ensure that your clients and their data will remain secure through redundant solutions that work. Educating customers about redundancy can be time consuming, but we promise that it will benefit the migration process and safety of their information for years to come.