Equipping a client estate has little in common with protecting your own company. You are not choosing a tool for yourself: you are choosing a business model, an architecture, and a commitment lasting several years that you will have to honour in front of your clients.
Here are the twelve criteria that really make a difference at that scale — in the order in which they catch up with you.
The business model
1. Who controls the margin?
This is the structuring criterion, and it comes down to one question: is the hosting imposed on you?
If the solution imposes its own storage, your margin is the difference between the vendor's price and your resale price. The vendor knows it, it is aligned with your competitors', and it compresses as the market matures.
If you can host it yourself, you are selling a service whose cost base you control. Above a certain volume, the gap becomes considerable.
2. How billing is broken down
Billing per workstation and per server fits naturally into a monthly maintenance invoice. Billing by volume stored is unpredictable: a client who moves 400 GB of photos blows up your cost without your being able to pass it on cleanly.
Look above all at what happens as things grow. Some models look attractive at 10 workstations and become untenable at 200.
3. The commitment required
Across an estate, you will lose clients. An annual commitment per workstation on a client who leaves mid-year is negative margin. Check how finely you can exit.
The architecture
4. Freedom of hosting
Three arrangements must remain possible: at your premises, at the client's, or on a dedicated server supplied by the vendor. Needs differ — an eight-seat accountancy practice and a 150-seat industrial firm do not call for the same answer — and you do not want two solutions to master.
5. Multi-site replication
Being able to replicate the backups to a second server, without going back through the client machines, is what lets you honour the "off site" promise without doubling the bandwidth consumed at the client's.
6. The local copy
Restoring 200 GB from a remote server over an ADSL link takes several days. From a local disk, it takes an afternoon. Being able to keep a local copy in addition to the remote one is not a luxury: it is what makes your turnaround commitments realistic.
The technical side
7. Block-level delta
Without block-level delta, a 4 GB file modified every day means 4 GB transferred every day. With it, a few tens of megabytes. Across an estate where many clients have modest upload links, this is what decides whether the backup fits into its overnight window.
Check that the delta applies inside the files, and not only at whole-file level.
8. Deduplication
Two levels to distinguish:
- Agent side: a file already backed up is not sent again. A gain on bandwidth.
- Server side: several identical files are stored only once. A gain on storage — a considerable one when you are backing up thirty workstations running the same operating system.
Across an estate, server-side deduplication is what transforms your storage cost.
9. Encryption at source
The data must be encrypted on the machine being backed up, with a key that does not travel over the network. That lets you answer the question that always comes up in a meeting — "and can you read our data?" — with a plain and verifiable no.
The corollary to accept: you become responsible for custody of the recovery keys. Plan the procedure before the first deployment, not after.
10. Versioning depth
Unlimited, configurable versioning lets you adapt retention to each client. Fixed versioning imposes the lowest common denominator on you.
Running it day to day
11. Multi-client monitoring
With five clients, you read the reports. With fifty, you need a console that surfaces the anomalies: failed backups, machines silent for too long, volumes drifting. Without a consolidated view, monitoring becomes a chore you will end up abandoning — and on that day you are selling a backup that nobody is watching.
White labelling matters too, less for ego than for continuity: it is your name the client should see on the reports.
12. Reversibility
The criterion nobody assesses until they need it. If you change solution in five years' time, how do you recover the history of thirty clients? A solution that stores the backups in a workable format, on a server you administer, leaves you a way out. Proprietary storage in a cloud you do not hold the keys to locks you in.
The framework on one page
| Criterion | What protects you |
|---|---|
| Hosting | Free: at yours, at the client's, or dedicated |
| Billing | Per workstation and per server, monthly |
| Commitment | Exit possible workstation by workstation |
| Replication | Server to server, without going through the agents |
| Local copy | Possible, for fast restores |
| Block-level delta | At block level, not file level |
| Deduplication | Agent side and server side |
| Encryption | At source, key never transmitted |
| Versioning | Unlimited and configurable per client |
| Monitoring | Multi-client console, white label |
| Support | In your language, reachable, no scripted first line |
| Reversibility | Workable archives on a server you administer |
The test to run before signing
Just one, and it tells you more than any comparison table: ask for a full restore of a test workstation, and time it.
In half a day you will discover what the documentation does not say — the real speed, the real ergonomics under pressure, and the quality of support when something jams. It is exactly the situation you will be in on the day a client calls you in a panic.
BeBackup was designed by an IT service provider for IT service providers. Ask for a demo or explore the solution.