Delivering AvePoint Data Resilience as a Managed Service Provider: A 5-Step Guide

As a Managed Service Provider (MSP), offering reliable backup solutions is not just a service — it's a cornerstone of your business. In today’s digital landscape, backup services are essential for businesses to ensure data security and continuity. With 54% of MSPs offering cloud backup and data protection for businesses, the calls for MSPs to have solid implementation procedures are louder than ever.

Recently, the importance of reliable backup solutions was underscored by an incident involving CrowdStrike's faulty update, which caused 8.5 million Windows devices running on Windows 10 and 11 to crash. This catastrophic event triggered the infamous “Blue Screen of Death,” highlighting the critical need for robust backup and disaster recovery plans. Such incidents serve as a reminder that even the most secure systems can fail, and having a trusted backup solution in place is essential to mitigate the impact of unexpected disruptions. Data Resilience is about more than backup, and AvePoint is designed to help meet the newest challenges your clients face. An offering built in partnership with AvePoint is truly unique from legacy BCDR vendors.

Starting with immutable, logically air-gapped backups built on resilient systems is crucial: any backup failure, corruption, accidental deletion or worse can result in lost customers, risk of litigation and a major hit to your reputation. A resilient partner like AvePoint ensures you can focus on growing your business and not troubleshooting backups and putting your bottom line at risk. Once you’ve secured a new client, you can onboard backups faster than anyone else with AvePoint Cloud Backup Express and recognize revenue with simple per-user or capacity-based pricing models (and no hidden fees) through AvePoint Elements. Our multi-tenant customer management platform for MSPs makes license management and pooled licensing a breeze. 

In this blog, we'll discuss five effective ways to get started implementing backup with AvePoint and grow your business.

1. Assess Client Requirements

Understanding your client’s unique protection needs is the first step. Each client has distinct needs based on their industry, data volume, regulatory requirements, and business continuity plans. For instance, a legal firm will require secure, immutable backups and additional data copies to meet stringent data retention laws and ensure client confidentiality. In another example, an e-commerce business might prioritize high-frequency backups and quick restore times to minimize potential revenue loss and maintain seamless customer experiences.

AvePoint assists with data discovery, helping you identify:

• Critical data and systems
• Frequency of data changes
• Protected scopes with ease

Whether a client needs to maintain multiple data copies across various storage mediums, ensuring the highest level of protection or needs to meet long term retention requirements. Our solution is designed to accommodate any configuration needs, minimize risks, and features direct integration with ConnectWise and SIEMs to alert you of failed backups. Our team of Microsoft experts is always available to assist.

With AvePoint, you get the industry's best RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective), ensuring comprehensive protection for all your customers' Microsoft 365 data, including often-missed elements like planner tasks, lists, managed metadata, and permissions. This level of fidelity is crucial because customers may not know what is and isn’t protected by legacy vendors.

2. Fight Ransomware on All Fronts

AvePoint combats ransomware in multiple ways. With Ransomware and Suspicious Anomaly Detection, client environments are monitored for potential incidents, and we suggest safe recovery points to facilitate swift recovery. Our backups are isolated from the primary environment, do not rely on vulnerable Windows-based appliances and provide an extra layer of security. Additionally, the right backup solution should:

• Support Multi-Geo Environments for Data Sovereignty
• Support the ability for you to BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) and/or BYOS (Bring Your Own Storage)
• Support Backup Replicas and follow zero-trust principles

AvePoint excels in these areas, providing granular recovery to minimize data overwrite and expedite recovery times, as well as express mass recovery from Microsoft 365 Backup Storage that never gets throttled.

3. Ensure Proper Configuration and Deployment

Proper configuration begins with identifying what needs to be backed up, focusing on critical data. Critical data is essential for business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR), as its loss can lead to significant operational downtime, financial loss, and damage to your clients' company reputation.

Solutions like AvePoint Policies offer advanced scan policies, which automatically protect new users, sites, and mailboxes, ensuring no critical data is left unprotected. Policies can also proactively monitor and neutralize violations of privacy, security, and compliance from the moment data is created, helping resolve threats before they become costly fines.

Thoroughly testing the backup process helps identify and resolve potential issues, ensuring the backup system works seamlessly when needed. Once deployed, continuous monitoring is crucial for ongoing reliability. Regular monitoring allows for the timely detection of any problems, ensuring the backup system remains effective and provides robust protection against data loss.

4. Establish Backup Policies and Schedules

Establishing robust backup policies and schedules is crucial for ensuring regular and reliable data protection and enabling swift recovery from system failures, cyber-attacks, or natural disasters. This includes creating a business continuity plan and defining roles for backup-related tasks.

AvePoint Cloud Backup allows for flexible backup schedules, up to 4X daily or multiple times an hour with AvePoint Cloud Backup Express. AvePoint is a preferred Microsoft 365 Backup Partner, which means you can protect your clients' most valuable data with the most aggressive backup SLOs (Service Level Objectives) possible.

5. Room to Grow

AvePoint’s competitive pricing, 46% cheaper per object with FLY, ensures profitability. Our solution creates seamless opportunities for upselling additional services. Easily attach capabilities for Power Platform, Project Online, Azure, Intune, Entra ID, Google Workspace, Google Classroom, and so much more to protect all your clients' critical workloads, no matter what cloud they’re in. This not only adds significant value to your service packages but also drives an increase in your Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR).

Don’t Just Partner with a Backup Vendor

Partnering with just a data protection vendor limits your ability to drive revenue. With AvePoint, data resilience is just the start. Becoming a data protection partner grants you access to our entire platform of comprehensive solutions so you can expand your service offerings as your clients’ needs evolve. The AvePoint Partner Program gives you the resources and tools to deliver exceptional backup services and beyond to migrate, manage, and protect your clients' Software as a Service (SaaS) data.

As an AvePoint partner, you can leverage our exclusive GTM kits available to partners to help you tap into new opportunities, positioning your business as a trusted service provider. Become an AvePoint partner today and boost your MSP services!