Companies partner with a reliable managed service provider (MSP) like VAST for various reasons, including streamlining operations, reducing costs, and augmenting limited IT staff. While these are all valid reasons for a company to leverage managed services, they may not be the most important ones for your business’s health. It’s possible that the most consequential result of engaging an MSP is to strengthen your business continuity posture.
Managed services boost business continuity in many ways, which, taken together, make your company stronger and better able to withstand the risks in today’s constantly evolving threat landscape. Let’s examine how top-notch managed services can improve your organization’s business continuity.
What Affects Your Business Continuity?
Your company’s business continuity can be adversely affected by multiple factors. The following common issues threaten your company’s business continuity and health.
- Cybersecurity incidents: Cyberattacks are one of the biggest threats to business continuity. Threat actors can cause major operational disruptions with ransomware or other malware variants.
- Infrastructure or hardware failure: Businesses can be disrupted by hardware or software failures that impact mission-critical processes and functions.
- Human error: Employees or contractors can inadvertently or deliberately delete or corrupt essential data, rendering normal business operations impossible.
- Natural disasters: Your company and the surrounding region may be affected by events such as hurricanes or blizzards, which can cause widespread power outages that impact your data center.
- Cloud platform failures: Organizations that rely on cloud services can have their businesses disrupted by issues affecting the cloud provider.
- Insufficient resource capacity: Companies can experience operational disruptions or degraded performance due to a lack of resources to address traffic spikes.
How Specific Managed Services Enhance Business Continuity
Companies can strengthen their business continuity posture by engaging an experienced MSP to manage their IT environment. The MSP’s expert teams can identify issues that may escape a business owner’s notice, especially in small to medium-sized companies that may lack the technical skills to manage their environment efficiently. The following managed services all contribute to better business continuity.
Proactive monitoring
MSPs typically provide 24/7 monitoring of the IT environment to identify existing and potential issues. This proactive monitoring approach provides early detection of looming equipment failures or performance degradation. Effective monitoring generates alerts before outages occur, allowing underlying issues to be addressed before disrupting business operations.
The MSP’s technical teams leverage the information gathered from proactive monitoring to reduce the time required to detect and resolve business-impacting issues. Rather than waiting for things to break, the MSP will identify and mitigate issues before they affect your business, enhancing continuity and resilience.
Data protection, backup, and disaster recovery
A modern company cannot function without access to its data assets. A reliable, experienced MSP will ensure your data is well-protected and always available. They achieve this goal through several overlapping processes that work together to keep data safe and ready for restoration in the event of data loss.
MSPs protect production data by implementing measures such as strong IAM policies to prevent unauthorized access before systems or information are compromised. They may also deploy data loss prevention tools that monitor user behavior to identify anomalies that may indicate the presence of malicious insiders who may delete or corrupt data.
Backups are an essential part of a comprehensive data protection strategy. An MSP can provide managed backups with an experienced, professional team that verifies that backup processes run successfully. The MSP may recommend moving from an on-premises backup infrastructure to a cloud-based solution, saving resources and adding another layer of resilience to support business continuity.
MSPs typically have disaster recovery solutions that utilize the backups as the foundation of a business continuity plan. Providers with cloud-based disaster recovery procedures can typically recover data to alternate geographic regions, for added resilience in large-scale events. The MSP should test the procedures regularly and work with your company to meet your recovery timelines.
Change and patch management
Your MSP should be responsible for managing changes to the IT environment that affect daily and long-term operations. The managed changes include application and operating system updates that ensure optimal performance and compatibility with other infrastructure elements. A thorough and well-documented change management process enables teams to quickly identify modifications that may be causing issues in the environment.
Threat actors regularly exploit known software vulnerabilities, putting your business operations at risk. Vendors release security patches to address vulnerabilities discovered in software or firmware. The MSP’s team should install these patches as soon as they are available to minimize the possibility of infrastructure components being compromised.
Security incident prevention and response
Companies can experience significant downtime due to security breaches. The MSP can manage firewalls, intrusion detection and response solutions, and endpoint protection tools to keep intruders out of your environment. They should have documented incident response plans that reduce the likelihood of data breaches or cybersecurity attacks and mitigate damage if a breach occurs.
Capacity planning
MSPs can analyze usage trends to support effective capacity planning and avoid degraded performance caused by insufficient resources. Their experts can help companies plan for seasonal traffic fluctuations or expected growth. Business continuity is promoted by optimizing workloads and ensuring the required resources are always available for the environment.
Customer support
MSPs offer 24/7 expert customer support to respond to issues immediately, no matter when they occur. This support reduces a company’s reliance on internal resources and ensures problems are addressed promptly. Business continuity is enhanced through defined service-level agreements (SLAs) for problem response and resolution.
How VAST’s Managed Services Protect Your Business
VAST’s managed services offerings include all the areas discussed above that promote a strong business continuity stance. Our experts can manage all aspects of your on-premises or cloud IT environment so that you can focus on your core business activities. We can also manage select areas of your infrastructure or conduct security reviews to identify vulnerabilities that must be addressed to protect your business.
Our team will work with you to develop a business continuity strategy that incorporates robust security, data protection, and backups. Contact us to learn more about how our managed services boost your business continuity posture.
