Companies engage managed services providers as technology experts to help oversee their IT infrastructure. These partnerships with MSPs can be critical, especially for smaller organizations. When done right, they allow the companies to focus on running their core businesses. Meanwhile, the trusted partner can recommend and manage the collaboration tools that enable their businesses.
A strong MSP partner will engage with the business to understand its technology needs and risk tolerance to ensure it recommends and implements the proper tools and technology.
Data Resilience and Recovery
Over the past several years, a troubling trend has emerged related to data backup and recovery. Too often, businesses misuse cloud collaboration platforms (CCPs) — such as Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive. This can be a costly mistake.
CCPs are great for efficiency, but not for data resilience and recovery. It’s important for MSPs to use the right collaboration tools to meet their clients’ needs and expectations. And clients must understand exactly how they are protected and where they may have gaps so they can make informed risk decisions.
CCPs and purpose-built endpoint data backup and recovery tools have some passing similarities. They have limited storage and some versioning capacity, but leveraging a CCP for data backup and recovery is like using a hairbrush to clean your teeth.
What Makes the Difference?
Todd Thorsen
True endpoint backup and recovery solutions cover all endpoint data automatically without relying on end users, policy compliance, storage limits, file version capacity, or user designation.
CCPs fall short in all these areas because they are collaboration tools and not purpose built for data backup and recovery.
Let’s tackle each of these issues in turn. CCPs rely on end users to upload files to the platform, and because this cannot be technically enforced, administrative policies must be implemented and followed by end users. This policy-reliant form of backup doesn’t account for the most common failure of all: human error. As a result, this can pose compliance, operational and legal risk to organizations as they must rely on end user actions to sustain their data resilience capabilities.
How many desktops have you seen littered with files that a user hasn’t saved to the drive yet, but plans to eventually, someday, or maybe? By contrast, purpose-built endpoint backup and recovery tools automatically back up all the data accessed, processed, or stored on the end user’s device.
CCPs have storage limits, short archive windows, file version thresholds, and don’t have the data residency, availability, and redundancy capabilities to support operational data resilience needs or compliance requirements.
Meanwhile, purpose-built endpoint data backup and recovery tools offer:
- Unlimited storage capacity
- Automatic backups of every version of every file
- Control over data residency
- High availability
In short, purpose-built endpoint data backup and recovery tools give MSPs and their customers peace of mind. Their critical data is secure and available for recovery at scale when things go wrong.
Establish More Than a Security Blanket
CCPs as backup solutions even fail by the definition of the word.
Backups are a second, secure version of a file users can recover when loss or corruption affects the original. But CCPs treat the working file as the backup file. When it’s lost or corrupted, there is nothing to recover; the data is lost.
CCPs should not be used for backup and recovery. They amount to little more than a checkbox. In fact, they may even give clients a false sense of security about their data resilience posture. This can develop into a significant issue when lost data needs to be recovered, but it is unavailable.
This article was updated on 11/15/2025.
Todd Thorsen is chief information security officer of CrashPlan.
Image: iStock
