Selling disaster recovery services to customers with reduced budgets

There's an often-used saying on how can a customer not afford to do disaster recovery and business continuity, similar to how can a client afford not to be insured. The reality is often different. For example, some companies are self-insured. They may be taking a similar approach with disaster recovery. In other words, they've conducted some level of BIA (business impact analysis), looking at their businesss to determine that it's cheaper for them to replace, or to revert to a degraded mode for some period of time.

However, it all comes back to the value of the business, the value of the information and the impact. What is it going to cause in disruption to the people, their customers, their partners; what impact would applicable threats pose to the business? And then, in turn, what is the impact of the business from a likely event? What is a corresponding level of defense for that protection? In other words, if your customer's business is going to be impacted, at the risk of being put out of business, and your objective is to help them stay in business, you're going to have to find a way to protect their data. It's a part of doing business.

So it really comes back down to that BIA and can they afford not to have that recovery. What will the cost of downtime be? What will the cost of disruption be?

The above Q&A was excerpted from Greg Schulz's disaster recovery services podcast. For the complete collection of Q&As, visit our Tips-to-Go: Data Disaster Recovery Services Tutorial.