Mary Coxon, Partner Marketing Manager, ThinkOn
If your practice is built on a hyperscaler (AWS, Azure or Google) ThinkOn doesn’t replace any of it. A common way hyperscaler-centric MSPs add a partner like ThinkOn to their line card is to reach full 3-2-1 backup best practice through fault domain isolation, also called cross-cloud redundancy. It is a straightforward, simple offering you can provide to your top-tier customers.
Where a single-cloud 3-2-1 falls short
The 3-2-1 rule asks for three copies of your data, on two different types of storage, with one copy off-site. When production and every backup live in the same cloud, the copies are separate, but they share a fault domain: the same provider, the same account structure and the same management plane. Counting copies is not the same as isolating them.
Fault domain isolation closes that gap. It puts at least one copy somewhere a problem in the primary environment is much less likely to reach. For a hyperscaler-centric MSP, that means a second cloud.
How ThinkOn completes it
ThinkOn is the second cloud. We provide services that integrate with hyperscalers and solutions that are not hosted or deployed in their ecosystem, so one copy of your client’s data sits outside the primary environment.
- Price certainty on the storage. An offering like this only works if you can price it for the long term. ThinkOn’s data storage pricing is predictable, so the cost of the copy doesn’t turn into a surprise invoice and you can quote your clients with confidence. We plan our storage on long-term supply agreements, which is what makes that possible while costs across the market rise.
- Cross-cloud redundancy. A copy in a separate cloud, which gives you the isolation 3-2-1 assumes.
- Services that integrate with the hyperscaler, so you are not rebuilding what you already run.
What stays the same
Your hyperscaler business. Your skills, your tooling and your client contracts stay where they are, and we don’t ask you to move anything off them. The second option is an addition, not a migration, and you decide which clients it makes sense for.
A simple offering for your top-tier customers
Add it to your top tier as one clear line item: backups that follow full 3-2-1, with one copy in a separate cloud. It is easy to explain, because it comes down to one sentence: your backups don’t live in the same cloud as your production environment. It is easy to add, because nothing in the hyperscaler environment changes. And it fits the clients who already ask the hardest questions, those with hyper-critical systems or heavy regulation.
Four questions to ask about your top-tier clients:
- Which of them have production and every backup copy in the same cloud?
- Which are regulated, and what do their auditors ask about where copies live?
- Could you show an insurer or auditor today that one copy sits outside the primary environment?
- Has any client asked for a copy outside their primary cloud?
A client who answers yes to the first question and is unsure about the third is your first conversation.
Let’s talk
Want to work out which of your clients would benefit from a second option? Contact us and we’ll talk it through.
