“MSP360 Managed Backup is a must for anyone in the IT service business. The software is dependable, the reporting is excellent, and you pay as you grow,” -- Steve Burdick, President of Galveston Computer Solutions
Galveston Computer Solutions was set up in 1997 to serve clients in the Galveston and Houston areas. Several thousand clients rely on Galveston Computer Solutions for a whole range of IT services. Remote backup support is an important part of their service portfolio. When client data is at stake, the company cannot take any chances. It has to offer clients the most robust solution possible while ensuring ease of use and management.
Business Challenge
Shortly after Galveston Computer Solutions was established, the company decided to offer remote backup service to its clients.
“This is a higher-end service that is more rewarding and has better growth prospects”, Steve Burdick, President of Galveston Computer Solutions commented. “Moreover, we live in an area prone to hurricanes and that was the motivating factor and selling point of our solution”, he added.
It first began by hosting the storage in-house but found the costs prohibitive and ever-increasing. Galveston area finally got hit by Hurricane Ike in 2008 where widespread flooding happened and customers lost data. The IT service company was able to recover its clients’ data nicely, proved the need for backup but questioned the reliability of in-house storage.
As an experiment, Galveston Computer Solutions switched some users to SOS Online Backup and some managed clients to Intronis. The results were not satisfactory. “SOS tech support was horrible and they stored the backup logs on the client’s PC. If the client’s hard disk crashed all backup logs would have been lost!” Steve Burdick said. The company also wanted to be in control of encryption keys, knowing where the data is and being able to access the data at the root, SOS Online Backup couldn’t do these things. That was not Galveston’s idea of a great backup.
With Intronis the software would fail randomly and would have to be restarted. The rock-solid reliability that GCS was looking for was simply unavailable. The IT service provider wanted to be sure of where their users’ data was stored. “We wanted confidence that data centers we were using had a solid pedigree and followed proven management best practices”, Burdick said. In short, they did not want to put their faith in a data center they did not trust. Also, GCS was looking for a backup management solution that would be stable, easy to use, well supported and that would allow them to use a data storage service of their choice.
Using cloud-based backup was a natural choice since it provided the redundancy and quality of service that GCS needed. Using a cloud service also ensured that they were not holding on to unnecessary storage and that they would pay only for the storage that they were using. When the data being managed reached 32 TB and the costs got too high, GCS decided it was time to switch.
Solution
GCS had been experimenting with MSP360 Managed Backup solution for some time and found that the product had the capabilities they were looking for.
“The main difference from other solutions that we considered was that we could finally leverage Amazon S3’s pricing and reliability”, Steve Burdick, President of Galveston Computer Solutions said.
The company was very clear that they wanted to have a backup manager that allowed them to use Amazon S3 storage. They needed to be sure about where their customers’ data was being stored and how it was being managed.
The MSP360 interface gave GCS the exact capabilities they were looking for. With the intuitive and user-friendly MSP360 interface, the need for tech support reduced markedly. They could use any storage service they wished to (besides Amazon S3) and they could also create local storage like a NAS or network share and keep local copies of data. Moreover, MSP360 Backup offered them detailed reporting capabilities that helped GCS’s business grow even faster. With a very transparent pricing mechanism, costs came down markedly.
“We have cut our cost from 20 cents per GB to 3 cents plus software license. We have been able to reach smaller clients with more aggressive pricing”, Burdick marked.
While the overall dollar value of savings is still to be determined, GCS estimates savings of at least $800 per month. “The software is dependable, the reporting is excellent, and you pay as you grow”, Steve Burdick said.
Galveston swears by the quality of support MSP360 provides. The company’s technicians are very satisfied with the support and the ease of management. They get proven 99.99% uptime and report only one occasion where the service didn’t load at first instance.
“Any service provider in the managed data backup domain must look for a solution that is transparent in pricing, gives them a choice of storage providers and offers great support”, the president of Galveston Computer Solutions said. “We found our answer in MSP360 Managed Backup”.
Conclusion
Galveston Computer Solutions has always understood the needs of SMBs and realized that this market segment is sensitive to costs but cannot compromise on stability and capability. The company found its cloud backup solution with MSP360 Managed Backup and Amazon S3. Going ahead with this combination, GCS improved their quality of service, increased ease of management and lowered costs. Cost per GB of storage went down from 20 cents to 3 cents per GB while reliability increased markedly. The GCS clients are happy with the service the company now offers; service engineers also appreciated MSP360’s high-quality technical support and the easy to use interface.
They get proven 99.99% uptime and report only one occasion where the service didn’t load at first instance. “To sum it up, I can advise all MSPs to gain as much control of your clients’ data as you can while taking the benefits of the Amazon S3 pricing. MSP360 Managed Backup is a must for anyone in our business. The software is dependable, the reporting is excellent, and you pay as you grow,” that is how Steve Burdick, President of Galveston Computer Solutions, summarized it.
- Cross-platform backup and recovery
- Flexible licensing
- Bring-your-own storage approach
