Jason Buffington .com

If you are trying to improve your org’s resilience, you likely will need third-party service providers – according to 502 BC/DR leaders. Let’s talk a look at which kinds of MSPs are most frequently utilized to improve Cyber Resilience and Disaster Recovery.

video transcript

When 502 business continuity and disaster recovery leaders were asked what kinds of third-party service providers that they currently use or have on retainer … I was happily surprised to find that Backup as-a-service meaning running backups to a cloud provider was the number one response used by more than 2/3 of organizations as part of their resilience strategy.

If you look closer at the data, you’ll find that there’s some interesting color bands that tell a story:

• The top three in blue are where organizations are supplementing or outsourcing key foundational aspects of resilience – including backups, cyber detection and monitoring, and threat intelligence. This is about modernizing capabilities while adding expertise.
• The next two in red are what do you need on your worst day, including instant response and external legal counsel specializing in cyber events. Even at this point we’re still talking about more than half of all organizations currently using or retaining those services.
• The green bands are interesting in that we’re going from foundational operations into elevating new capabilities. In this case, why BaaS when you can DRaaS — so utilizing failover to cloud hosted infrastructure, as well as critical event management and notification. These are things that most organizations couldn’t pull off if they were self-deployed and managed but are ideally delivered through third parties.
• Lastly, in purple, we see expertise around traditional BC/DR both from a planning and auditing perspective and legal counsel.

This slice of data was so interesting that I’m spinning up a whole other project on Cloud-Powered Resilience, just to understand what customers are looking for – not only across these services, but why they chose the service providers that they did across the BaaS, DRaaS, and CRaaS continuum.

Stay tuned for more on that project. In the meantime, what are your thoughts about third-party providers as part of your resilience strategy?