Key Points
Evaluating SaaS Backup SLAs Against Client Recovery Requirements
- SLA Evaluations Ensure Compliance: Evaluations are structured reviews of vendor promises vs. client needs, across uptime, RPO/RTO, retention, security, support, exclusions, and cost.
- Evaluate SaaS Backup SLAs: Identify the definition of vendor SLA components and compare them with client recovery thresholds to flag gaps early on.
- Turn Gaps into Actions: Help clients meet their recovery objectives by creating workarounds tailored to mitigate identified recovery gaps.
- Visualization Boosts Impact: A side-by-side matrix helps visualize downtime, data loss, and compliance risks, helping clients to see business impacts quickly.
- Consolidate MSP workarounds with vendor SLAs: Unify vendor promises and MSP controls in a one-page Service Alignment Plan to map gaps to actions, owners, timelines, and RPO/RTO targets.
- Transparent Communication Maintain Compliance: Present a client-facing side-by-side matrix on QBRs to document retention policies, RPO/RTO performance, exclusions, and residual risk.
- Leverage NinjaOne for Automation: Utilize ticket analytics, documentation templates, supplement SaaS backup services, and dashboards to reveal gaps, prove due diligence, and guide improvements.
MSPs must evaluate SaaS backup SLAs to ensure that SMB clients’ recovery objective requirements are met. Doing so aligns service delivery with client expectations, especially for clients operating under strict compliance regulations.
Practical MSP strategies to evaluate SaaS backup SLAs
Without reviewing service-level agreements for SaaS backups, MSPs foster unfounded assurances, leading to complacency until an incident exposes recovery gaps. MSPs could also risk compliance oversight, with potential penalties if retention or recovery doesn’t meet regulatory requirements.
That said, in-depth reviews of SaaS backup SLAs are essential, especially when identifying gaps and communicating vulnerabilities to clients. This not only aligns expectations to realistic service delivery but also ensures recovery strategies fall within RPO and RTO requirements.
📌 Prerequisites:
- Copies of vendor SLAs for SaaS backup services
- Access to a centralized documentation system
- Documentation of client RTO and RPO requirements
- Existing client compliance obligations (for example, HIPAA compliance, SOX, GDPR)
- Consistent client engagement cadence
Strategy #1: Review SaaS backup SLA components
A backup SLA evaluation doesn’t start with comparisons to client requirements; instead, it should first clarify the vendor’s recovery commitments. Clarity is vital because terms like uptime, RPO, and RTO are often conflated and could cause misunderstandings.
Component-level reviews also surface recovery gaps, such as limited retention periods, to prevent surprises when an outage occurs. Additionally, these reviews help MSPs formulate workarounds for identified weak spots, providing clients with reliable backups that meet their needs.
Key SaaS backup SLA components to evaluate
- Availability/Uptime: Vendors express downtime using percentages. MSPs must clarify what each percentage represents (like, 99.9% uptime = 60 minutes of downtime in a year).
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO): Pinpoint how much data loss tolerance a vendor SLA provides.
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO): Identify the maximum time it takes to restore systems, as stated in vendor SLAs.
- Liability and exclusions: Surface recovery areas that vendor SLAs don’t cover, and identify compensation after an SLA violation.
- Security: Look into how a SaaS vendor stores data and evaluate the protection SLAs provide for data at rest.
- Cost: Review the cost of vendor backup policies and any additional fees for add-ons for effective IT cost management.
Strategy #2: Compare SaaS SLA promises to client requirements
After breaking down the key vendor SLA areas, compare identified metrics against client thresholds to expose gaps early. Doing so grounds unfounded data-loss and downtime expectations within the realistic vendor capabilities, preventing surprises during outages.
Additionally, side-by-side comparisons between vendor SLAs and client requirements prevent accidental non-compliance and unexpected licensing costs. Consolidate data within a simple matrix to surface issues and mitigation strategies during client meetings.
Sample vendor SLA vs. client requirement matrix
The following sample matrix compares identified vendor email backup commitments against client requirements.
| Backup component | Vendor SLA promise | Client requirements | Status | Recommended action (example) |
| RPO | Snapshots every 4 hours | ≤ 4 hours | ✅ | Automatically send alerts when backup delays are detected. |
| RTO | Bulk restore every 12-24 hours. | ≤ 8 hours | ⚠️ | Prioritize file-level restores over bulk restores. |
| Retention policy | 3 years of policy-enforced retention | 3-year retention period | ✅ | Execute 3-year retention policies for compliance. |
| Uptime % | 99.95% (~8 hours and 45 minutes of downtime per annum) | 99.95% (~4 hours and 23 minutes of downtime per annum) | ⚠️ | Consider higher-tier plans to meet the uptime requirement. |
| Security | AES-256; immutability available in premium subscriptions | AES-256 at rest, TLS 1.2+ in transit, and immutability for critical mailboxes | ⚠️ | Consider a premium subscription for immutability features. |
| Cost | 1-year standard plan coverage; overage costs extra per GB stored | Predictable total cost of ownership; no hidden fees for longer retention and restore times | ⚠️ | Forecast storage costs annually to predict costs and minimize bill shocks. |
| Exclusions and liability | 30-day soft-delete coverage; small service credit for compensation | Soft-delete coverage | ⚠️ | Implement weekly restore drills to ensure backup reliability and create alerts to catch unusual deletions. |
Legend: ✅ Meets expectations; ⚠️ Partially meets expectations; ❌ Doesn’t meet expectations
Strategy #3: Present identified vendor SLA gaps in a client-facing manner
Effective communication enables MSPs to convey technical information, helping clients make informed decisions without wading through overly complex jargon. Aside from that, client-facing reports also make risks tangible for stakeholders, justifying costs and encouraging quick, compliance-driven actions.
Directly translate gaps into business impacts; for instance, convert potential RTO and RPO losses into financial losses and possible regulatory fines. Below are sample client-facing one-liners MSPs can use to communicate findings to non-technical clients urgently:
- “Vendor RTO of 24 hours can potentially lead to $20,000 in downtime losses.”
- “HIPAA compliance requires 6-year data retention, making the vendor’s 3-year cap non-compliant, causing potential fines and legal penalties.”
Strategy #4: Document and communicate SaaS backup SLA findings
Create a one-pager summarizing identified SLA gaps, alongside their potential impact on client processes and proposed workarounds to mitigate risks. This gives clear visibility on where vendors fall short, streamlining faster client approvals and budget sign-offs.
As specified in Strategy #3, leverage client-facing formats and business-focused language to highlight information that clients care about. Consider incorporating technical details into visuals to highlight critical metrics and ideas for non-technical stakeholders.
Share reports during client onboarding to align service expectations and recovery objectives before vendor SaaS backups go live. In QBRs, this shows clients’ actual backup performance against recovery objectives, allowing strategy refinement through vendor renewals, upgrades, or replacements.
Strategy #5: Define MSP value in SaaS backup evaluations and risk mitigations
Backups don’t always do the heavy lifting, as tiered offerings sometimes fall short against recovery objectives, risking non-compliance for clients. MSPs evaluate SaaS backup SLAs to expose risks and mitigate them through workarounds, ensuring clients meet recovery needs.
MSPs should document workarounds within a one-page service alignment plan, communicating how they supplement vendor SLAs to cover client recovery needs. This one-pager also serves as a quick runbook during incidents, centralizing first-hour actions so identified gaps don’t breach MSP SLAs.
Inside this documentation, highlight the value you provide to clients, such as:
- Supplementary monitoring and reporting to support vendor SLAs.
- Creation of workarounds to ensure vendor RPO and RTO remain compliant
- Documenting recovery tests to ensure backup reliability during incidents.
- Providing escalation and accountability beyond vendor SLAs.
NinjaOne integration ideas to evaluate SaaS backup SLAs
NinjaOne helps MSPs evaluate SaaS backup SLAs by centralizing evidence, automating reporting, and supporting existing vendor backup services.
- Ticketing Summary Reports: Get comprehensive metrics, such as MTTR, first response time, and technician performance insights for detailed backup SLA analysis.
- Documentation tool: Store vendor SaaS SLA documentation and custom evaluation templates centrally within a single knowledge base for smoother knowledge handoff.
- SaaS Backup: Supplement existing Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 backups to meet client recovery objectives. Instantly recover from accidental deletions, misconfigurations, and ransomware through point-in-time and item-level recovery options.
- Reporting Dashboard: Use NinjaOne’s comprehensive reporting dashboards to spotlight backup SLA compliance and gaps within client-facing reports. Automate report generation and delivery to maintain transparent client communication.
- Ticket tracking: Highlight MSP value by analyzing ticket details, identifying technician touchpoints, and providing SaaS backup SLA-related interventions.
Quick-Start Guide
Key Points from NinjaOne’s Approach:
1. Comprehensive Backup Coverage:
– NinjaOne SaaS Backup covers Microsoft 365 (mailboxes, contacts, calendars, tasks, OneDrive, SharePoint, Groups & Teams), Gmail (including calendars, contacts, and tasks), and other IMAP email servers.
– It provides both backup-only and backup+archiving options to meet different compliance requirements.
2. Flexible Retention Policies:
– Offers customizable retention periods for emails (30 days to 11 years) and SharePoint data.
– Supports unlimited retention for backup-only subscriptions and configurable policies for archiver-type subscriptions.
3. Advanced Search and Reporting:
– Provides SaaS Insights Dashboard for analyzing email usage patterns and productivity metrics.
– Features Advanced Search capabilities to help locate specific data quickly.
4. Service Principal Authentication:
– Minimizes security risks by restricting data access to minimum required levels.
– Eliminates need for global admin creation and automates custom role creation.
5. Partner Portal Integration:
– Allows partners to monitor backup status, manage organizations, and track usage metrics.
– Provides tools for enabling/disabling features like OneDrive backup and archive.
How This Helps Compare SLAs Against Business Needs:
– Clear Visibility: Partners can see exactly what’s being backed up and how it aligns with client requirements.
– Customization: Different subscription types (backup-only vs. backup+archiving) allow matching solutions to specific compliance needs.
– Cost Management: Usage reporting helps control costs by showing actual backup consumption versus purchased seats.
– Security Compliance: Service Principal Authentication ensures backups meet security requirements without excessive permissions.
Evaluate vendor SaaS backup SLAs to ensure client compliance
Vendor SLAs on their own sometimes can’t cover all the required recovery objectives specified by clients. When left undetected, these gaps can create bigger risks, surprising MSPs and clients during incident recovery.
To ensure client protection, MSPs should compare SaaS backup SLAs against actual client recovery requirements and needs. A thorough SLA evaluation helps MSPs surface risks, prevent compliance failures, and highlight their role in maintaining business efficiency and functionality.
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