If you’ve ever spent hours, or even days, manually restoring data back into a SaaS platform like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, or ServiceNow, you are painfully aware of the benefits that a comprehensive backup and recovery solution can provide. But just because you see the value doesn’t mean other stakeholders in the organization will. Especially if they aren’t working in the platform every day like you, experiencing the challenges of manual exports and time-consuming restores.
So, how do you express the advantages of investing in a data backup solution to the key decision makers in your business? In this post, we explain how to create a persuasive business case for a SaaS backup and recovery solution, broken down into five key steps.
1. Identify key stakeholders
For your business case to be successful, you need to identify the key decision-makers within your organization. For something like data backup, this will likely include more technical decision-makers who want to know how the proposed solution would integrate within the existing tech stack, as well as leaders who will ask questions more geared around the business strategy behind implementing such a solution.
While it will vary slightly based on each company, the typical stakeholders that will be involved in a decision like this will be roles like the CIO, CTO, Chief Compliance Officer, Head of IT, and VP of Technology.
2. Align with top business priorities
Once you know who you are making your case to, you have to get their attention. The best way to do this is to align with what they care about. For example, maybe your CIO’s top priority is to reduce technical debt throughout the organization. In that case, start thinking about how having a backup solution can help reduce technical debt (by the way, it can!)
By doing this, you’ve immediately changed the conversation from, “I need a backup solution for Salesforce”, to “I have a solution that will remove an obstacle in the way of your goals”
3. Define the pain
Keeping in mind the business goals you identified earlier, you’ll need to convey the specific challenges that the current solution (or lack thereof) is creating. By breaking it down into specific challenges, you can uncover who it impacts.
For something like data backup, your challenges might include things like:
- If the SaaS platform experiences a service disruption, we would have no way of accessing our data
- With no way of being alerted to a data incident, data loss could go undetected for days, weeks, or longer within our org.
- With the native backup solution from the SaaS provider, it is difficult to get parent-child relationships back intact with native export functionality
- Our “backups” are NOT compliant with regulations like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) or GDPR, putting us at risk for major fines during auditing
4. Quantify the value
Quantifying the ROI of your proposed solution can be difficult, but it’s a key step in building your case. One way to quantify value is to determine how much the status quo costs your organization. How long does it take you or other admins to find specific records in your backups and restore data manually? What is the value of your time, and what could you be doing instead?
You can also look at organizations who have already implemented the backup solution you are proposing and find benchmark data to make realistic calculations. For example, you might find that a similar sized organization in your same industry was able to restore data 3x times faster after implementing a similar solution.
5. Propose a solution
Now that you’ve laid out challenges that the current situation is creating, it’s time to propose your solution. No leader wants you to come to them with a problem without also having a suggestion on how to solve it.
Just like you presented specific challenges, you need to provide specific benefits of your proposed solution. Here are some examples for a data backup solution:
- Minimize data loss risk and costs
- Maintain regulatory compliance
- Build business resiliency
- Accelerate digital transformation initiatives
Choosing a backup and recovery solution
Hopefully, taking the steps above will help you successfully make your case for why you need a backup and recovery strategy for your company. Now it’s time to find the right solution.
When it comes to something as important as protecting your company’s data, make sure you consider everything to help choose the right partner. For a complete list of factors to assess, as well as a downloadable scorecard to rate the solutions you are evaluating, check out our comprehensive guide: The Buyer’s Guide For Backup and Recovery.
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