“I liked the idea of using MSP360 Managed Backup as the front end because of its ability to let me pick and choose from among many supported cloud storage providers. It is much better than being locked into one provider for everything, with zero flexibility" - Joel Carson, the founder of East Coast Technical Services.
Background
East Coast Technical Services was founded in 2001 in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada. For fifteen years, the company has been serving small and medium-sized offices as well as home offices, operating in the real estate, health, financial, and building industries. East Coast Technical Services offers its clients custom-built PCs, PC repair, network setup and support, malware removal and prevention, and offsite backup. “The most essential components of our business are the reliability and quality of the services that we offer. These are the things that our clients appreciate in us,” said Joel Carson, the founder of East Coast Technical Services.
Business Challenge
East Coast Technical Services believes that businesses of all sizes, even one-person companies, should back up their critical data. They offer their clients a cloud backup service. For several years, cloud backup has been the best option that East Coast Technical Services saw for SMBs. “Compared to local backup, cloud backup is easier to monitor, does not require any extra physical devices, and spares our IT staff from frequent visits to our clients’ offices”, said Carson. “To ensure the highest level of safety for their data - I want our customers to use our cloud backup solution and not rely solely on their onsite backups,” he added.
First, the company implemented MozyPro but soon started to realize that the bills for their services were becoming too high.
They did their research on cloud storage per GB prices vs. Mozy's internal storage pricing and concluded that if they backed up securely to a public cloud service, they would save money, while continuing to offer their clients an affordable and dependable cloud backup service.
“We realized that to keep our managed cloud backup service competitive, we needed to find a less expensive solution.”
East Coast Technical Services started their tests of different public clouds and finally opted for Google Nearline, cold storage offered by Google Cloud Platform. “Their pricing seemed promising for our business: $0.01/GB and with excellent retrieval speeds despite being ‘cold’ storage. I thought this might be something that would solve our problem”, said Carson. The
company started looking for a way to backup to Google Nearline. Their key criteria for the right cloud backup product were minimal hands-on after setup, good reporting capabilities, and a comprehensive rebranding option.
Solution
East Coast Technical Services opted for MSP360Managed Backup and after some testing implemented the solution. “I liked the idea of using MSP360Managed Backup as the front end because of its ability to let me pick and choose from among many supported cloud storage providers. It is much better than being locked into one provider for everything, with zero flexibility.” Joel Carson, the founder of East Coast Technical Services, told us. With MSP360Managed Backup, they were able to automate backup to both Google Nearline and Amazon S3 for different clients from the same backup console.
The IT service provider also enjoyed the MSP360rebranding feature as well as remote management and monitoring capabilities. “We can manage the backup schedules of clients, assign licenses, and even edit, monitor, and start backup processes all from within the MSP360console,” Carson said.
Being new to public clouds, East Coast Technical Services enjoyed the prompt support of MSP360.
“The MSP360 support team was always ready to assist us when we had difficulties with Google Nearline or MSP360 Managed Backup. I was impressed by their excellent response time to our questions. I feel I have dedicated support in case something goes wrong,” said Carson.
MSP360 Managed Backup also met the company’s price requirements. East Coast Technical Services was now able to offer its clients cloud backup service at a better price. “Thanks to the combo of MSP360Managed Backup and Google Nearline, we were able to reduce our backup service costs,” added Carson. The company now backs up 32 endpoints and expects to continue cloud backup growth.
Conclusion
After implementing MSP360 Managed Backup, East Coast Technical Services was able to shift from backing up with an all-in-one backup solution to backing up securely to public cloud storage. This reduced their costs for cloud backup service. The company enjoys the ability to choose from among many cloud storage providers for the MSP360 Managed Backup, and successfully uses both Google Nearline and Amazon S3.
East Coast Technical Services leverages the MSP360 management console that is available from the browser, to optimize the work of its IT staff. The IT service provider re-branded the solution as they wished. The good monitoring features and reliable support service allows East Coast Technical Services to make sure that the backups of their clients are safe and ready to be restored anytime if needed.
“If you don't mind building your backup solution yourself, and by that I mean working with separate cloud storage providers and cloud backup software, there's a significant ongoing cost reduction in using MSP360 Managed Backup vs. an all-in-one solution like MozyPro. Thanks to MSP360, I made my cloud backup solution more profitable and more flexible”, said Joel Carson, the founder of East Coast Technical Services.
