Spending may be tight, but small to midsize businesses still recognize the need for business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR). After all, a weak economy doesn't reduce the risk of disaster striking. Businesses in certain industries must still meet compliance requirements. And with the threat of a swine flu pandemic still lingering, the risk of business interruption for all companies has risen.

"With increasing frequency, we are seeing small companies looking into what they can do to prepare for a pandemic," says Omar Yakar, a consultant with Ingram Micro Services Network (IMSN). "So companies need to figure out how they will get by with only half their staff."

Earlier this year, Gartner analysts pointed out that a true pandemic could cause absenteeism rates of 40 percent or higher for enterprises and their business partners and suppliers, resulting in severe operational disruptions.

Solution providers can enhance their role of trusted advisor by helping their customers plan for risks that threaten to hurt their businesses. Through IMSN's Seismic, solution providers have a variety of BC/DR managed services that they can rebrand and provide to their clients. These services include remote online backup and restore, as well as Instant Recovery On Demand by CA, a powerful host-based business continuity service. IMSN also offers project-based BC/DR consulting through a North American advisory firm with 15 to 20 years of BC/DR experience at such large enterprises as Caterpillar, Pulte Homes and Toyota, Yakar says.

As companies become more aware of the need to plan for a business disruption, solution providers can step in with BC/DR services at affordable costs, Yakar says. "This is particularly useful for very small companies," he notes. "Resellers can offer them services that will take a lot of risk off the table."

By leveraging both the Seismic managed services and the IMSN consulting packages, solution providers can deepen relationships with existing customers and open doors to new customers as well, says Justin Crotty, Ingram Micro's vice president of services. "These Ingram Micro services enable resellers to provide very valuable services from respected experts to their clients," he notes.

IMSN and Seismic provide marketing materials and special programs, too, such as educational webinars, that resellers can rebrand to position themselves as BC/DR experts. "It's not a hard sales pitch. It's educational," Yakar says. For example, a webinar might spark interest in getting an assessment. That assessment usually finds gaps that the reseller can then fill by selling hardware, software or managed services that will provide recurring revenue. "The reseller might even become the recovery site for the customer," Yakar says.

In response to economic woes, IMSN this year launched some lower-cost packages that offer basic, but limited, protection. Rather than a complete BC/DR plan, for example, IMSN has packages that assemble enough information on the company, "so that if there were a disaster, we could drop in a team that would know enough about the business priorities and basic information that it could help them recover effectively and quickly," Yakar says. Another offering is a "right-size insurance guide," in which the team evaluates the SMB's business interruption insurance and recommends changes to make sure the policy provides what the business would require to get back on its feet.

For more information on IMSN or Seismic, go to ingrammicro.com/seismic or call (800) 705-7057, option 5.