How to sell disaster recovery to every customer

Real-time demonstrations can reap benefits in securing customers, says Greg Wyman, StorageCraft Asia Pacific vice president.

Most business people know about disaster recovery, or think they do. But the scale of disaster can range from a Christchurch earthquake wipe-out, to human error and losing full production for hours, days or weeks.

When targeting a prospective sale of disaster recovery solutions, a channel salesperson should first ask the following simple questions:

In an ideal world

• If a server crashes, how much data can you afford to lose and how much time can you invest in having your staff re-keying it? Ten minutes? Fifteen minutes?
• If a server crashes, how quickly would you like to be back in full production – knowing that the IT team would need to restore your operating system, data and databases.  Would you like the complete server restored in 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 60 minutes?

Once you have established the customer’s recovery objectives, ask if their existing backup product can deliver their preferred recoverability levels, as discussed. In most cases the answer will be a resounding no.

A compelling pitch

Now ask the prospective customer if he/she would invest $1.67 per day per server to have three to five minute disaster recovery, and to be able to recover files, folders, databases (eg Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, Oracle) to any 15-minute point in time.

By now you would have secured their close attention, so suggest the following: “Imagine the peace of mind your technicians would feel if they were able to arrive at work in the morning, look at a single screen, and know that every virtual and physical server across all their offices, including remote sites, has had a full recovery test performed during the night – and that all data and databases are recoverable.”

Go on to explain that if a red light is showing, a problem exists with the backup on that specific server. Click on the problem, receive details about it, then remote control into that server, fix the problem and see everything go green again. It’s that simple!

It’s a compelling pitch, and of course it will vary according to which vendor’s disaster recovery solution is being discussed. So be sure to choose a vendor who is able to deliver a working solution.

From experience, I would ensure that any vendor selected is able to demonstrate (real-time demonstrations rather than PDFs, Flash or PowerPoints) near-instant recoverability of physical and virtual servers; protection of data and databases every 15 minutes; and having the ability to test fully the recoverability of every server every night without using manual intervention.