Business continuity and disaster recovery plans are often seen as insurance and so many businesses will weigh up the risk of spending the money on a solution against that of not having one in place.

Some sectors have no choice. Businesses must comply with regulations so they want vendors and resellers to assist them. In tougher times, risk management is at the forefront of business decision-making.

There is also demand for new approaches to service delivery as customers push for greater flexibility over their contracts and payments.

In areas such as server hardware and storage, the channel must demonstrate real cost savings for their customers.

Managed services and dynamic infrastructure solutions – such as Software as a Service (SaaS) in all its flavours or managed back-up and availability services – are therefore coming to the fore, especially for businesses looking to slash capex.

SaaS is flexible, allowing for changing market conditions and technology requirements.

There are two key steps resellers should consider when deciding whether to provide managed services to businesses of all sizes.

First, they should select vendors that recognise the market’s need for managed services and are willing to provide solutions that fit.

Secondly, they must make the services easy to understand yet flexible – within reason.

SMBs may need to comply with legislation as much as larger organisations, but are likely to be especially interested in more cost-effective ways of achieving business continuity and disaster recovery planning.

With managed services, SMBs may buy enterprise-class solutions as needed, on a pay-as-you-go subscription.

The level of cover may then be adapted quickly according to market and business needs.

Yes, capex can be reduced, but managed services can also cut opex for customers. The level of manpower required to run back-ups or ensure availab ility of critical applications or data will be vastly reduced.

Larger organisations may also use the same technology to move IT workloads any time, anywhere and for any purpose. This will cut the costs associated with migrations, provisioning new servers and planned downtime.

Ian Masters is sales and marketing director at Double-Take Software