5 questions MSPs should ask before choosing a BCDR vendor

Today’s SMBs expect always-on business continuity to keep pace with rising customer demands, especially amid escalating ransomware attacks and increasingly complex compliance mandates. For MSPs, this environment presents a massive opportunity: business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) is not just a technical need, but a potential profit engine. When built right, BCDR can become the backbone of any MSP service stack. Yet for many MSPs, it remains one of the largest line items and riskiest service investments.

Why? Because not all BCDR vendors are created with MSPs in mind. Too many MSPs are still forced to patch together disjointed tools that weren’t designed to meet the pressures of multitenant delivery or the speed that modern service level agreements (SLAs) demand. This patchwork approach increases overhead, slows response times and eats away at margins. Others turn to low-cost options that compromise on recovery reliability, scalability or ongoing support — putting their clients’ data and trust on the line.

So here’s the real question: Are you willing to wait for a major client disruption to discover that your BCDR vendor isn’t up to the task? If not, this blog is for you. We’ll discuss five critical questions every MSP should ask before choosing a BCDR vendor — and as we go, you’ll see exactly why Datto continues to lead the way in BCDR.

1)   What is your RTO/RPO across different recovery scenarios (file restore, VM virtualization, full DR failover), and how do you achieve them?

When it comes to business continuity, recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) are the metrics that matter most to your clients. They define how quickly operations can be restored and how much data loss is tolerable. For most businesses today, the expectations are clear: recovery should be fast, and data loss, non-existent.

Many BCDR vendors make lofty claims about instant recovery without a tested infrastructure or documented recovery times to back them up. Terms like “instant recovery” often sound great on paper but fall apart under pressure. Imagine your client, a healthcare provider, hit by ransomware during peak hours. Their electronic medical record (EMR) system goes down, their backups aren’t boot-ready and your team scrambles for hours to restore operations.

That’s not just a bad day — it’s a broken SLA, a tarnished reputation and potentially a lost client. In regulated industries like healthcare, it can even lead to legal consequences. There’s also an operational cost. Every minute spent manually rebuilding a client environment is time your technicians aren’t billing on other projects. Beyond that, if you can’t consistently deliver fast, reliable recovery, it’s nearly impossible to justify premium pricing for your services. In short, poor recovery performance puts your clients at risk and drains your business from the inside.

Datto’s answer:

Datto’s approach to BCDR is engineered from the ground up to help MSPs deliver low RPOs and near-zero RTOs — and to do it with confidence.

Datto offers:

• Instant virtualization: Whether on a local Datto appliance or in the Datto Cloud, entire systems can be spun up in minutes. This means your clients stay operational even if their primary infrastructure is completely offline.
• Inverse chain technology: Unlike traditional backup chains that rely on previous snapshots, Datto’s Inverse Chain Technology™ creates a full, independent backup every time. That means every backup is a fully bootable system, eliminating dependency on potentially corrupted historical data.
• Automated screenshot verification: It’s not enough to say a backup works — it must be proved. Every day, Datto boots up backups in a virtualized environment, takes a screenshot of the login screen and verifies backup integrity so you’re never guessing when disaster strikes.
• Backup Concierge Program: Datto provides MSPs with a dedicated backup solution architect who ensures each client workload is aligned with the right protection strategy and SLA, enabling consistent recovery and profitable service delivery. The program also supports sales success by offering guidance on pricing, packaging and quoting. Your concierge can even join client meetings and demos as part of your team, while giving you access to co-brandable marketing materials and ready-to-use campaigns to help close more deals.

And the numbers back it up: Datto partners perform over 105,000 cloud virtualizations annually, with an average RTO of less than six minutes, and 42% of those virtualizations are completed in under two minutes. That’s the kind of performance that wins trust and retains clients.

2)   How does your solution protect against ransomware and ensure clean restores?

Ransomware is evolving rapidly — both in frequency and sophistication. Today’s attacks don’t just encrypt production data; they actively target backup infrastructure to modify or delete backups and block recovery efforts. This level of disruption is especially dangerous for SMBs, who are now seen as easy and high-value targets. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, a new ransomware attack is expected every two seconds by 2031. As the threat intensifies, it’s more important than ever for MSPs to have effective ransomware defenses in place to protect their SMB clients and ensure uninterrupted business continuity.

Fig 1: The need for ransomware resilience

The impact of a ransomware incident without proper backup protection can be severe. If backups are compromised, there may be no viable restore points, leading to extended downtime, breach of SLAs, financial losses, reputational damage and potential legal issues.

Datto’s answer:

Datto’s platform is built with multiple layers of protection to defend against ransomware and ensure backup integrity:

• Hardened Linux appliances: Datto’s infrastructure runs on Linux, minimizing exposure to common vulnerabilities of Windows-based software.
• Immutable cloud backups: Backups are stored in write-once-read-many (WORM) format in the immutable Datto Cloud, preventing alteration or deletion by ransomware.
• Ransomware detection: Machine learning-driven anomaly detection scans backups for unusual patterns and alerts you to suspicious activity early on.
• Screenshot and application service verification: Every backup is automatically tested with visual proof and service-level checks to confirm it is bootable and ready for restore anytime.

3)   Can you provide transparent pricing, including for cloud retention, off-site copies and disaster recovery spin-up?

Many BCDR vendors lure MSPs with seemingly low upfront costs, but the real expenses show up later, often when it hurts the most. Cloud storage, data egress fees and “emergency” recovery charges tied to resource utilization or spin-up can all drive up your costs. For instance, data egress fees — charged when moving backup data to an external environment — can inflate your client’s cloud bill by 20 to 30%.

For MSPs, this kind of unpredictable billing creates serious problems. When disaster strikes and clients expect a fast recovery, surprise charges force uncomfortable conversations and eat into your margins. To build reliable, profitable services, you need pricing clarity. It’s the only way to confidently package offerings and avoid billing shocks that damage client trust.

Datto’s answer:

Datto’s pricing model is simple and transparent. It includes everything — backup appliances, cloud storage, long-term retention, DR testing and full disaster recovery events — under a flat monthly rate.

• Free-to-use hardware: Datto provides backup appliances with no capital expense, eliminating the need to amortize hardware over its lifecycle.
• No egress or bandwidth fees: MSPs can failover and failback from the cloud without facing hidden costs or usage penalties.

This all-in-one pricing model enables MSPs to build consistent, bundled services that protect margins and support healthy, recurring revenue.

4)   How does your support work? Do you provide guided disaster recoveries and 24/7 help?

An IT crisis is never routine. Even experienced technicians can find themselves under intense pressure during a disaster recovery scenario. In those moments, having real-time guidance and expert reassurance can be the difference between a smooth failover and prolonged downtime.

Unfortunately, many BCDR vendors fall short when it matters most. Some only offer a self-service portal, leaving MSPs to troubleshoot high-stakes situations on their own. Others limit support to business hours or charge extra for 24/7 access and guided recovery assistance, adding cost when you’re already dealing with a crisis. This lack of hands-on support can leave you stranded during your biggest client emergency, straining relationships and putting critical systems at further risk.

Datto’s answer:

Datto delivers 24/7/365 direct-to-expert support as a standard offering, not a premium add-on. During actual disaster recovery events, Datto’s trained technicians and incident response team work side by side with MSPs to execute failovers and perform full restores with precision. This hands-on, white-glove service empowers MSPs to commit to aggressive recovery SLAs with full confidence, knowing they’re backed by a team that’s been through it all.

5)   What is your roadmap for cloud, SaaS and hybrid workloads — and how do you handle future integrations?

Business infrastructure is changing fast. More SMBs are moving from on-prem environments to hybrid setups, multicloud deployments and SaaS platforms. For MSPs, that shift brings both opportunity and risk. If your BCDR vendor can’t keep pace, you’re left stuck — juggling multiple point solutions or dealing with costly, time-consuming migrations just to keep up with client demands. A stagnant product roadmap limits your ability to upsell new services like SaaS or cloud backup and blocks your path into adjacent offerings like networking-as-a-service.

Datto’s answer:

Datto continues to invest heavily in expanding its ecosystem to support the evolving needs of modern MSPs. With a comprehensive portfolio of trusted solutions, Datto remains the go-to partner for protecting critical workloads across cloud, SaaS and hybrid environments. Key solutions include:

• Datto SaaS Protection for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace
• Datto Backup for Microsoft Azure
• Endpoint Backup with Disaster Recovery for protecting remote endpoints or workloads hosted in cloud environments like AWS
• Support for macOS in Endpoint Backup, coming August 2025
• Planned expansion into new SaaS workloads, including Salesforce and Microsoft Entra ID, expected later this year

Alongside product innovation, Datto is building tighter integrations across its portfolio to increase efficiency and simplify operations. One recent example is OneDeploy Secure Edge, which is an integration between Datto BCDR and Datto’s SASE solution, Secure Edge. This reimagines how disaster recovery networking is handled by automating connectivity to DR infrastructure, eliminating the complexity of manual networking setup. It also enables MSPs to offer networking-as-a-service without requiring full infrastructure replacement.

Datto also helps MSPs stay future-ready with programs like FLEXspend. FLEXspend protects your BCDR investment while adapting to changing client needs. You can reallocate your spend across Datto BCDR solutions — such as migrating protected VMs from on-prem to Azure or converting an active BCDR contract into Datto Backup for Microsoft Azure — without starting from scratch.

Choose a partner, not just a product

Choosing a BCDR vendor isn’t just about comparing features or chasing the lowest upfront cost. It’s about who you can trust when it matters most. It’s about having the right support behind you and a roadmap that drives long-term profitability.

With Datto, you’re not just getting a backup device — you’re gaining a partner committed to helping you deliver resilience, scale your services and grow your business with confidence.

Join thousands of MSPs who trust Datto. Become a Datto Partner today.