The key to success as an MSP is to grow your customer base without increasing your operating expenses. Here’s the story of how a medium-sized MSP achieved that goal by leveraging the efficiencies of MSP360 Managed Backup and Wasabi cloud storage to power its managed backup services.
The Challenge: Building Cost-Efficient, Easy-to-Manage Backup Services
Sausalito Networking is a California-based MSP that serves about 250 clients in the San Francisco Bay. In August 2019, the company decided to add managed backup and recovery to its service offerings.
Finding customers interested in Sausalito’s managed backup offering was easy enough. The hard part was constructing a solution stack that would enable the company to deliver that service in a cost-efficient, profitable way.
At first, Sausalito Networking experimented with other backup and recovery software. It found that these tools lacked the centralized management features that its engineers needed to deliver managed backup efficiently. The software also didn’t provide a seamless process for modifying backup routines and adding new endpoints. And because Sausalito relied on a complicated, custom backup storage solution, the company was not taking advantage of the simplicity and reliability of cloud storage for its backups.
MSP-Friendly Backup Managed Through MSP360 Managed Backup
These considerations led Sausalito to evaluate MSP360 Managed Backup, which is found to be a much better fit for its backup needs.
MSP360 offers robust remote management features that make it easy to centralize and streamline backup and recovery administration, according to John Hall, president of Sausalito Networking. With MSP360, Hall’s team can “can modify, start or cancel a backup from the console,” he said, eliminating the need to juggle multiple interfaces in order to manage backups for different endpoints or clients.
He added that setting up MSP360 Managed Backup is well-suited for the needs of MSPs. “Initial setup is clean and tech-friendly, not oversimplified,” Hall said. The tool “asks the right setup questions that a tech person would want.”
Now, Sausalito’s techs can manage backups easily, from anywhere. “It’s just a matter of installing the client and logging in when we are working on a remote laptop, desktop, or server, and then we have complete backup control,” Hall said. “So simple to do and modify anytime.”
Wasabi Cloud Storage Adds Cost-Efficiency
The fact that MSP360 makes it easy to back up data to almost any public cloud, without charging additional fees, allows Sausalito Networking to get even more value out of its solution stack. The company uses Wasabi Cloud Storage, which offers easy configuration and billing, as well as a low overall cost, according to Hall.
By pairing Wasabi’s storage solution with MSP360’s backup and recovery software, Sausalito Networking has been able to extend its managed backup services to include three times as many endpoints as initially planned, without an increase in cost -- a tremendous boon to profitability.
“We have the same staff, the same time investment, and the same budget, but we protect three times as many endpoints,” Hall said.
Sausalito Networking’s experience drives home a key lesson for MSPs: While the market is filled with backup tools and cloud storage services that provide the same core functionality, the operational efficiency, user-friendliness and cost-effectiveness of these solutions varies tremendously. MSPs who want to offer a managed backup service that not only works but is also profitable must look for backup software and storage solutions that enable easy-to-manage, cost-effective backup, and recovery at any scale.
- Cross-platform backup and recovery
- Flexible licensing
- Bring-your-own storage approach
