Former Navy SEAL Rob O'Neill told a packed room of MSPs at MSPWorld about how he got prepared before going into battle: "two is one and one is none." His motto was if you only take one of anything it is not enough. If something happens, having a backup is really important. Important advice for a Navy SEAL and important advice for MSPs.
A recent survey by Forrester Research found that more companies are employing "multi-cloud" strategies. More than 50% of the 727 senior IT managers surveyed said they were using a mixture of internal private cloud, hosted private cloud and public cloud platforms.
2 is 1 and 1 is none
MSPs need to look at all their significant vendors and view them from a perspective of redundancy and risk. That means if you rely on a particular vendor to delivery your managed service you had better have a backup identified and ready to go.
Typically, this would mean having another vendor ready to fill in in the event of a problem with the principal vendor. But, this could mean building other redundant systems into your service delivery process. If you manage firewalls, have two firewall vendors. If you provide hosting, select two hosting facilities.
This model does not mean you implement dual vendors for every managed services deployment. It means you have a secondary vendor ready to go in the event of catastrophic failure. Taking this simple step can save you a lot of time (in the event of an emergency) and give you peace of mind.
