Is babysitting backups destroying your employee retention?

If you have your skilled techs tied up with managing slow or complex backups, you could be seriously damaging your business, warns N-able's Carrie Reber.

Carrie Reber, senior product marketing manager at N-able.

Skilled technical people are the key to any MSP’s success and growth. In fact, data from Service Leadership shows the inability to get and keep such talent can be a top business risk for MSPs.

It’s not surprising. These individuals are in high demand, and typically have their choice of where to work. The shocking thing is how often an MSP’s own process and technology choices impact their ability to attract and retain needed colleagues.

Standardize on efficient backup

How many hours does your team spend on routine tasks, like checking and troubleshooting backup jobs, each week? How much time do they spend logging in and out of multiple backup products across different customer environments? If you haven’t standardized on an efficient backup product, the answer is probably, too many.

According to a survey from CompTIA, technical people leave jobs for several reasons, and it’s about more than money. A whopping 72% cite a desire for growth and development as their top cause, followed by only 39% who express the need for more compensation.

Unnecessarily complex backup processes that involve multiple products, different cloud providers, and varied storage locations can create a situation where only your most experienced teammates are trusted to keep things running. This is bad for everyone. Your highly skilled people will be bored and your more junior teammates will miss the opportunity for growth and development that can come with a backup product they can fully manage and own.

Burning through hours on backup

Paul Foley, director of Procision IT, discovered his team was burning through more than nine hours a week on this mundane task. When he switched to N-able Backup, Paul found he recovered about ten hours a week of productive, billable time. More importantly, he said, “If I were to take technicians’ complaints as a KPI, it’s gone from a lot to almost zero.”

Do the math. Check to see how many hours each week are consumed with babysitting backups, and which people are being saddled with the responsibility. Are you in danger of losing your best people out of sheer boredom? Take a look at N-able Backup, and see how much better things can be for your most precious resource—your people.

Carrie Reber is senior product marketing manager for N-able.