From 20 to 200 locations: a backup playbook for fast-growing DSOs

Growth-by-acquisition has a dirty secret: the spreadsheet of "what's protected" is always behind the deal flow. Every practice you close is a practice running someone else's IT, on someone else's backup, until you change it.

Make protection part of the close

The groups that scale cleanly treat backup as a day-one onboarding step, not a someday-IT-project. The new location's agents and policy get deployed through the same control plane as everywhere else, before the sign changes.

Standardize, then delegate

• One policy, applied fleet-wide. New sites inherit retention, encryption, and schedule automatically — no per-site reinvention.
• MSP-operated rollout. Your partner onboards each acquisition so your internal team isn't the bottleneck on every deal.
• Evidence from the start. Compliance coverage and reporting include the new location immediately, so an acquisition never creates an audit gap.

The metric that matters

Track time-to-protected — hours from close to first verified backup. The best groups measure it in a single business day. That number, more than any architecture diagram, tells you whether your backup strategy can keep up with your growth.