Technology Reseller v39

technologyreseller.co.uk 19 seamless experience around technology so that when they come into the office environment, whether that is at home, in a coffee shop or anywhere else in the world, the technology just works. Those virtual engineers can be doing things like patch management and health checks out of business hours, so that when staff in the customer’s IT department come in, they can actually spend time doing what they are good at. TR : Isn’t this what Datto has always done? GJ: Yes, absolutely. We are about bringing enterprise-grade technology down to the SMB space. Ultimately, that is what we do. We are a security company, but we are always trying to improve the lives of engineers within MSPs so that they are able to be more responsive and deliver on their service level agreements (SLAs) to their end user customers. A lot of that is to do with the metrics behind it: the real-time analytics, the reporting capabilities right across the customer estate, so that MSPs can articulate and show the value-add that they deliver. The whole point is to move away from a break-fix model, where the customer interacts with the MSP when there is a problem. That is a flawed business model; you should not be seeing your MSP on a day-to-day basis. TR : Where does something like back up and disaster recovery (BCDR) fit into the co-managed IT world? GJ: If an in-house IT department is outsourcing some of its BCDR, you could say it is co-managed, because arguably the MSP looks after all the data to make sure that business is protected and if something does happen it can be up and running within seconds as opposed to days, hours, weeks or even months. On the back of the health pandemic, we are seeing more uptake of business continuity and disaster recovery because businesses now understand how vital IT is to their organisation. Many are operating successfully in many different locations, whether in other parts of the world or just from home, and they understand that an outage will cause productivity to fall through the floor. When you start looking at business continuity and disaster recovery, or even backup, people assume it’s a process that automatically happens, but there’s quite a lot of work on the back of it, especially now when even small organisations traverse many different SaaS applications, platforms and systems. It is not just a question of backing these up, but of verifying that the backup was successful, virtualising it and swinging it up and checking that it loaded successfully so that should there be an outage the customer knows it has that point to go back to. TR : Do many businesses use multiple MSPs on a co-managed basis? GJ: It’s unusual. Larger organisations, like the NHS, might outsource services to a number of different MSPs or a number of different specialists on a co-managed basis, but once you start coming down in scale it is more normal for an internal IT support department to work with one MSP in a co-managed environment. The trend now is about making businesses more profitable and productive through their use of technology. In the past, businesses used to have to mould their business processes around technology, whereas now it is more a case of technology moulding around your business. Getting your in-house teams working with external specialists gives a real value-add even when it comes to challenging the status quo on a project. If we look at Datto, we are absolutely relentless and 100% focused on our security, but we don’t do all of that at Datto. We use external teams to verify our work and it should be exactly the same for in-house IT departments: use other parties and specialists to challenge, verify and collaborate on projects. Many MSPs work with 10, 100, 200 businesses so they see a lot more in terms of business processes and how technologies are being implemented. Eco-E cient Paper for Every Day Printing www.paper.co.uk Carbon Capture available ● Top performing light weight paper ● Reliable choice for high-volume printing ● Produced using 40% less wood ● Available throughout the UK from Premier Discovery vert strip ad 3-21.indd 1 31/03/2021 16:35