Business preparedness: How MSPs handle disaster  

You build redundancy and design the failover, so your clients don’t have to worry about downtime. For many, you even write the disaster recovery plan, so they are ready in case of an emergency. But when was the last time you held your own business to the same standard? 

Practice preparedness best practices 

When was the last time you tested your backups? MSPs regularly discuss the importance of testing backups with clients. But how often do they practice what they preach? 

“I tell every client to test their backups quarterly and keep an offline ‘break-glass’ credential kit,” says James Sanford, President of Teamspring. “Meanwhile, our own internal runbooks live in the same PSA system we manage for everyone else — which means if our RMM or cloud PSA goes down, the documentation on how to recover it is trapped inside the tool we’re trying to recover.” 

Sanford admits that the top reason he hasn’t addressed this preparedness gap is because clients always come first. At the end of the day, “client fires win the calendar,” which is a reality many MSP owners can relate to. Putting the clients first is a priority. 

“We bill for client DR testing; we don’t bill for testing ourselves. That is the honest reason, and I’m not proud of it,” Sanford explains. 

Don’t learn the hard way 

The last thing you want is a client to learn the lesson the hard way. Especially if you know what it feels like to be caught unprepared. Some MSP owners have learned the hard way thanks to disruptions in their own business. “Way back a hurricane came through the Houston area,” explains Greg Brainerd, owner of Braintek. “At the time my phone system and server, including my email and ticketing system, went down for a week due to storm damage.” 

Luckily, Brainerd had pre-printed tickets for his techs, so they could continue to help customers. He also rerouted calls to his cell.  

“What a pain that was,” Brainerd continues. “After that I moved everything to cloud systems so that would not be an issue in the future.” 

A similar issue happened to John Kistler, owner of J&B Technologies. After losing power for more than an hour, the power surge when it came back on took out a lot of equipment, including computers. An hour without power turned into a two-week ordeal. 

“After that we moved our essential workloads to the cloud and have backups at our main location,” Kistler says. “Now I want another complete setup at a second location just in case something happens at either location.” 

How can MSPs get better prepared quickly? 

“You don’t need a 40-page plan this week,” says Sanford. “Pick your single point of failure – the one person, password or vendor that would stop you from invoicing or supporting clients – and fix just that one thing this week.” 

For most small MSPs, a lot of the business is conducted through the owner’s cell phone. If that’s the case for your MSP, Sanford suggests getting a second dedicated business phone and duplicate your critical MFA codes. Then hand that off to your second-in-command so everything doesn’t rely on your phone.  

Kistler offers similar advice. He says to take time to write down the way your business information flows. Figure out what needs redundancy. Then start adding equipment until the entire path is backed up. 

“It doesn’t take long to create a disaster recovery plan,” Kistler says, “But it takes a long time to recover from not having one.” 

What nobody is saying out loud 

Businesses rely heavily on their IT service providers when disasters hit, and sometimes that is part of the problem. Clients don’t understand what goes into keeping them up and running. Often, clients aren’t prepared, don’t have a backup plan, and look to you to be the hero. 

Kistler and Sanford agree that having honest conversations with clients is the first step to helping ensure both clients and MSPs are prepared.  

“Have conversations with your clients about what real downtime means and then tell them any personal stories you have or that your clients from previous outages have had,” says Kistler. “Then start to plan. Send them a disaster recovery document and ask them to please fill it out.” 

Sanford takes the conversation one step further, acknowledging something the industry rarely discusses. “We need to stop pretending we’re immune because we are the technical people,” Sanford says. “The industry talks about RTOs and failover sites, but we don’t talk enough about the emotional reality: You can’t be your clients’ first responder if you haven’t prepared your own mental bandwidth. The best continuity plan in the world fails if the owner is running on two hours of sleep and a dead phone.” 

Would you pass a preparedness audit? 

Part of running an MSP means prioritizing that clients are prepared. That can leave even the most experienced operators with gaps.  

To better prepare your MSP for the unexpected ask yourself the same hard questions you ask prospects: Where’s your single point of failure? What happens if you can’t get to the office? Who else has the passwords? 

When you act on what you find, you won’t be caught off guard.  

Hear more about how MSP owners make sure they are prepared for a preparedness audit. Read Is your MSP preparedness audit ready?