“If you want to be able to offer your clients a flexible and affordable backup service that has excellent remote management capability then look no further.” -- Steve Putnam, The PC Wizard
Background
PC Wizard was started in 1997 in Torrington, Connecticut to provide PC and laptop repair for residential clients. Since then the company has grown significantly and now supports hundreds of small business and residential clients offering them a full IT service. The mission of The PC Wizard is to bring big business technologies/ solutions to individuals and small businesses at an affordable price. The company takes much care to understand the customers’ business processes and needs. That allows them to customize a solution that is right for their customers.
Business Challenge
The PC Wizard came to the market when the IT support service had just started to appear. 17 years of business experience proved that an IT support company can only satisfy its clients when it offers them up-to-date technologies but at an affordable price. This principle, that The PC Wizard chose to follow back in 1997, was seriously tested once it had been time to switch customers from tape backup to the cloud. “When everyone started talking about cloud, it got clear that tape was going to become a history”, said Steve Putnam, Senior Cloud Services Architect and Engineer at The PC Wizard.
“The biggest challenge was to puzzle out a wide range of cloud backup solutions that appeared on the market.”
First, the PC Wizard opted for MozyPro solution but eventually got disappointed by the quality of backup. “MozyPro was having errors in the backend that prevented backups from occurring frequently. Another issue was that Mozy would stop working when a storage quota was reached”, Mr. Putnam said.
Also, The PC Wizard’s clients were not satisfied with the MozyPro retention policy (limited up to 90 days), which meant a client wasn’t able to restore a copy of a document older than 90 days. Given all that, the cost of the solution was too high for such a product and The PC Wizard wasn’t able to create a profit margin. Having gained their first experience of using cloud backup, The PC Wizard was ready to redefine their requirements and continued looking for a suitable solution.
“We wanted to be able to leverage the low-cost backend enterprise storage offered by Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. We understood that only implementing a backup software that is separate from the backend storage would allow us to lower the cost of cloud backup service and have a profit margin”, said Mr. Putnam.
As The PC Wizard’s clients are spread all over two states, the company needed a remote management console available for all settings. A flexible retention/purge option, centralized monitoring, and client-side encryption were also on the list of indispensable features.
Solution
The PC Wizard considered several backup companies such as Acronis, CrashPlan, Carbonite and Barracuda, however, only MSP360 was able to offer a product that met all needs of the IT support company.
The flexibility of MSP360 Managed Backup has all indispensable features such as retention/purge criteria, compression, and client-side encryption. All of them allow The PC Wizard to create a unique backup scenario for each customer for their different needs. Also, The PC Wizard is now able to set and control the backup process on all customers’ PCs from an easy-to-use management console.
After implementing MSP360 Backup, The PC Wizard increased its backend storage from 3TB to nearly 8TB and cut their costs by 40%. That allowed the company to offer its customers with large data stores a cloud backup solution at a more attractive price. “We chose MSP360 Managed Backup for a better competitive price, its independence from a single cloud vendor and a wide range of beneficial features”, Steve Putnam said.
Conclusion
Today The PC Wizard can provide a much higher level of service using the tools offered by MSP360. The flexibility of MSP360 Backup enables The PC Wizard to create a unique backup plan for each client so that their customers are more willing to implement cloud backup. This is proved by the increase of their backend storage from 3TB to nearly 8TB. “We are very pleased with the product. We have made several suggestions for improvement and many of them have been implemented already”, Mr. Putnam said. “If you want to be able to offer your clients a flexible and affordable backup service that has excellent remote management capability then look no further.”
- Cross-platform backup and recovery
- Flexible licensing
- Bring-your-own storage approach
