How to Explain The Importance of Backup Retention Policies to SMB Clients

Communicating the importance of backups and surrounding concepts such as backup retention, can be frustrating for managed service providers (MSPs). Clients often struggle to understand the devastating impacts of not being able to restore key data, and it is therefore critical that MSPs are able to effectively convey the importance of designing sensible backup retention policies and the required processes and infrastructure to enact them.

This guide provides a framework for explaining the importance of backup retention policies in plain language for business stakeholders, so that you have the best tools available to help clients understand the ramifications of under-investing in their backup solutions.

What is backup retention? Backup retention strategies

First, let’s begin with a quick recap on backup retention and strategies so you know what you’ll be communicating to clients:

Backup retention is the process of keeping historical backups of different data for different periods of time, based on the importance of the data and how frequently it changes. It’s closely related to the concept of RPO/RTO objectives in backup and data recovery (BDR). This is done for operational recovery rather than archival purposes.

Process-wise, backup retention works as follows:

• Data (from file servers, databases, SaaS tools, etc.) is backed up to multiple locations on a schedule, ideally following the 3-2-1 rule
• Backups are deleted according to a retention policy as they reach a certain age
• Granular backups are kept for more recent changes, while older backups may span longer time periods to save storage costs
• Backups are verified, and if differential backups are used, maintained so that data integrity isn’t compromised

Backups should be regularly verified, and the recovery process tested to ensure that data can be restored in a timely manner. Failure to do so may leave your clients vulnerable to data loss caused by malware, or lead to them failing to meet compliance requirements.

The primary purpose of a backup retention policy

A backup retention policy defines and documents the timelines for the above process, sometimes with multiple timelines for different types of data.

For example, you may have frequently changing, highly important data like sales records that need to be backed up hourly and retained long-term for auditing purposes (you might want to go back and compare records for different periods to see if they have been tampered with), whereas records containing employees personal information will change less frequently, and may not be needed long term (indeed, it may need to be regularly pruned to comply with privacy laws regarding personal information).

The key purpose of the policy is to ensure that relevant data from as close to the present as possible can be restored in full, even if an issue has gone unnoticed for a while, such as ransomware creeping through your file shares. This must be balanced with technical factors such as the backup medium, security measures, and the costs of maintaining them.

Backup retention business impact

Backups make sense to anyone who has spent any significant amount of time working in IT, but the negative impact of poor backup policies and practices on a business is often not well understood by non-technical stakeholders. As an MSP responsible for your clients’ data (and by extension, business continuity), it’s your job to make sure that this is clearly communicated and acted on.

If this fails, you must at least have evidence that the risks have been clearly communicated, and have the client sign off that they are declining to follow recommendations or best practices and are responsible for any detrimental outcomes.

What you need in order to clearly explain backup retention to clients

To achieve the goals stated above, you’ll need the following:

• Defined Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for each client workload
• Access to retention settings and backup job logs in the backup platform
• Awareness of industry or regulatory requirements (including data protection laws like HIPAA, GDPR, PCI, SOX) that may dictate retention minimums
• A client-facing reporting template (Excel, Power BI, or NinjaOne Docs)

This will help you deliver the required information clearly, linking the technical factors of backup retention to real business impacts and helping your clients make informed decisions:

Method 1: Translate retention into business scenarios

30 days may sound like a long time, but in backup and disaster recovery (BDR) it’s a relatively short period. Convincing business stakeholders of this in technical terms can be challenging, so translate the impacts to real-world scenarios, like:

• 30 Days: “If ransomware is discovered after 45 days, you won’t be able to restore clean data.”
• 90 Days: “You can recover most incidents, but compliance audits may still require a longer backup history.”
• 1 Year+: “You can prove compliance and retrieve data even from older business disputes.”

Method 2: Link retention to compliance and legal exposure

Identify the compliance and privacy laws relevant to your clients (such as HIPAA, GDPR, SOX, and state privacy laws). Show how insufficient retention creates business risk, for example:

• HIPAA: Fines if medical records are unrecoverable within 6 years
• GDPR: Inability to produce user data on request can result in fines, while data should only be retained while it is needed for its original purpose
• SOX, FINRA, and SEC: Penalties for missing or incomplete financial records

This can be presented as a checklist that shows how different retention timelines affect compliance.

Method 3: Use plain-language metrics and examples

Avoid technical jargon about data loss and recovery methods, and focus on the practical outcomes. Speak in terms of dollars and time to communicate severity in business terms. For example, explain how a missed backup could cost $X thousand dollars for each day of data lost due to lost productivity, or that losing Y months of sales data would take 200 hours to recreate manually.

Present a single page clearly demonstrating what could happen if disaster scenarios occur.

Method 4: Show restore gaps with visuals

To ensure suitable coverage, present graphical representations of what’s recoverable under current policies, charting:

• X-axis: timeline (days of retention)
• Y-axis: percentage of recoverable data
• Highlight gaps and note cadency

This will help your client understand what will be restored after a recovery, and help you coordinate with them whether backup and retention strategies need to be revised.

Method 5: Build retention recommendations into QBRs

Quarterly business reports (QBRs) are an ideal time to explain backup retention policies and make any necessary revisions. You can use real data to inform your QBRs to give your recommendations real evidence and context to back them up. You can also compare client retention policies to their industry peers, highlight any gaps that have become evident in the preceding period, and make recommendations based on these.

QBRs are also a good time to document client approval of your backup retention policy, and overall BDR strategy, and have them explicitly sign off that they understand the impacts and risks of it. This way, if they have declined to follow your recommended best practices, this is recorded for accountability later.

NinjaOne centralizes your backup apparatus, making it reportable and understandable

Translating the risks of a poorly designed backup retention policy to clients requires careful wording to ensure the severity of the matter is fully understood. Succeeding in this will help improve client trust and drive them to adopt more of your services to protect their data.

NinjaOne helps MSPs with this by centralizing the reporting and management of all of your clients in a single interface, making it possible to report, visualize, and analyze the backup status of all endpoints and key business data. This makes gaps visible and ensures the business impacts can be assessed and communicated. From this, you can use the same resources to inform effective backup retention policies.

NinjaOne also assists with the implementation and enforcement of policies: you can create tickets when backups fall below thresholds, document agreed-upon policies, and automate enforcement through scripts. Using these tools, you can help your clients avoid downtime, fines, and lost revenue.