Tyler Fergusson's blog

When it comes to the cloud backup of data, it seems that we’re constantly bombarded by technologies, speeds and feeds, expensive and low cost solutions, and who’s best out there. We all know backup is important, but sometimes I think that because backup is such a main focus for so many vendors, we often forget WHY we backup in the first place. (So now everyone is saying, “to recover data you idiot.” Keep reading…)

When we look at the SMB space, we’re typically looking at an IT staff of one or two people. These people are also heavily over tasked, and backup is just one of the unglamorous and mundane tasks that has to be done. Not only is the IT staff heavily over tasked, more often than not they’re constantly juggling a “break and fix” solution because of being heavily under budgeted. So at 5:00pm every day, IT has to go into the server room/wiring closet and put in today’s backup tape in hopes that a successful backup is completed by the morning. Sounds simple enough right?

Now, everyone’s entitled to a little time away from work now and again. This is where everything that is bad that can happen, WILL. Now that our faithful IT person is away, this usually gets delegated over to the office manager. Prior to taking vacation, there is a quick meeting that takes place to show our office manager where the tapes are, and what to do on a daily basis in order to get our daily backup done.

Unfortunately what that IT person FAILS to do is show our office manager how to RECOVER data and systems should they need to. Doesn’t it make sense that a backup is useless if we can’t recover from it? So how does showing our office manager how to backup protect the business from downtime should there be a data or system loss event? IT DOESN’T! What if our IT person was out for an entire week and the company lost their Exchange, SQL or other critical server on the first day with nobody having the competency to restore it? The company won’t close down until it’s restored, but how are we expected to continue operations?

I hope that if you’ve gotten this far in this story your head is nodding in agreement to some degree.

Now, let’s look at this exact same scenario if our IT staff from the same SMB Company offloaded the mundane task of backup to a service provider. There would be no need to worry about that tape at 5:00pm every day. No need to hope and pray for a successful backup job to be completed the next morning as our service provider monitors this on our behalf. No need to worry about having to go and ask for capital budget because we have out-dated backup hardware. No need to worry about going on vacation (and yes, IT guys worry about things going wrong when they go on vacation), and no need to train non-technical staff to perform technical operations that effectively don’t serve much of a purpose in the absence of the IT people to begin with.

While that IT person is enjoying their vacation, should there be any data loss, or system outage, our trusted service provider is available 24x7  for anyone in your organization to call to enlist their help to recover (yes, they provide those type of SLA’s for you!).The best part of all of this is that it’s all rolled into a low cost monthly service.

If you're ready to alleviate the pressure on your internal IT staff, check out  "How to Choose a Cloud Backup Service Provider" whitepaper for more information. 

Over the last 7 years alone we've seen a mix of media such as Travan, DDS, DAT, VXA, LTO 1, 2, 3, 4, and now 5, DLT, SDLT, AIT. And these are just the ones that come to my mind quickly. The reality of it is that organizations have flip flopped through these different media types, and most likely have a mixture of these tapes at a records storage company. Unfortunately they don't have the tape drive to restore it anymore though. But wait, there are companies that provide data restore services, right? Of course, however it's a very costly endeavor.

So with all this said, “How do I attack my first backup to my MSP that I’m outsourcing my backup to? I don’t want to have to store all my old data and pay a premium for it.”

To start with, seeking MSP’s that can offer a tiered cost structure is imperative for your business. They will help you identify the business critical (young) and archival (old) data and properly be able to define policies that will properly back this up and store it according to RTO (Recovery time to Operation). The beauty of being able to do this is that from a recovery standpoint, we’re recovering all of our data from disk. No more worries of not having the right tape drive on hand, or the need for extremely costly tape recovery services.

At the end of the day, cloud should be a long term strategy in an organization’s top down approach from a computing perspective, data protection being one component of it. Doing things right the first time will always achieve a better result from my experience as well.

If anyone has questions regarding this, please feel free to reach out.

One the goals of the Channel Management Team here at Asigra is to help customers (our partners) successfully and profitably deliver their Asigra Powered Cloud Backup service. And there’s no better way to help customers then to share insight from those who’ve done an exceptional job at delivering and growing their backup offering.

This morning I interviewed Chris Day, President and CEO of Fully Managed Inc. based out of Vancouver, Canada. Chris had some great insight and I’d like to share that with you. I look forward to your comments and suggestions.  

Q. How much growth do you see on an annual basis for your backup services?

Chris: We are forecasting approximately 50% growth in our cloud-based backup services for fiscal 2010 within Vancouver, BC and the rest of Western Canada. We see that growth number as being stable and sustainable for fiscal 2011. We started out in January 2010 with 2TB of compressed/de-duplicated data and doubled our capacity to 4TB of compressed/de-duplicated data in the first three months. This equates to approximately 13TB of actual data protected data. We anticipate being close to 10TB compressed/de-duplicated by the end of calendar 2010 which should equate to 32.5TB of protected data, using our current ratio of 3.25:1. Our revenue has doubled in a four month period, partly due to the ease of implementing the software and partly due to our ability to accurately and simply report on the usage.

Q. How did you manage to grow your business to what it is today? What’s your secret sauce?

Chris: The reason for our success is that we understand our core purpose – our reason for being – Creating Peace of Mind. The Fully Managed approach means that we focus on what we do instead of how we do it, resulting in a natural affinity for clients to want to do business with us. Asigra has created Peace of Mind for us as an organization because we are finally able to focus on delivering solutions instead of babysitting the product as we ended up doing with many of the other solutions out there (including Kaseya BUDR and Zenith’s BDR solution).

Q. What advice would you give to other MSPs out there who are looking to grow their managed backup business?

Chris: If you’re considering a backup solution to augment your offering to your clients, do your homework. We learned the expensive way that making the wrong choice early on requires a lot of effort to undo. You end up with terabytes of data “stuck” in another cloud or on your own infrastructure, and it’s very difficult to make a move without a significant investment. When selecting a platform, focus on stability and reliability of the platform – make sure you understand the recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) and build your solutions around that. Asigra has delivered for us and our biggest challenge now is trying to keep up with the demand.

Technology is a marvelous thing. If you think about the business world, be it SMB, SME, Enterprise, or MSP, we all encounter technological challenges. Now, the question is, “how good do you feel when you’ve implemented technology that really solved a pain point?”

Just 2 days ago I was on the phone with a customer and I asked him the following questions. How did you look to solve your challenges? How did your search begin to find a suitable solution? Did you start online? Call your favorite account manager at your go-to reseller? Ask some friends or colleagues in the industry? The answer was not surprising. YES to all.

When it comes time to engaging with suitable solutions that may solve current challenges, what’s truly needed is the sharing of information. Today’s technology manufacturers should not be ‘sales people’. They should be acting as consultants. They should be willing to open the floor up to you. The more information that you (as a prospect) can share with technology vendors/solution providers, the more they can help determine whether or not their solution is a fit for you. By informing them of the challenges you are facing, and allowing them to address how their solution will help alleviate them, you will have the ability to make a much more informed choice.

At the end of the day, we’re all consumers. Think of how you like your buying process to be and seek out those organizations that will allow you to make the most efficient choices for your technology needs.

Those of you who know me well know that I’m a very inquisitive guy. I very much enjoy being a fly on the wall while listening to a nearby conversation that could potentially add some comedic value to my day.

I was on the commuter train early last month going to lovely downtown Toronto and became a fly to an IT conversation. It seemed as though the two gentlemen that were talking were mid-level IT management that were facing challenges with something that I talk about every day. You guessed it, backup and recovery. Their conversation revolved around the removal of tape from their environment and replacing it with disk, both for primary and long term archival. There were even talks of them archiving it off to the cloud. Raised my eyebrows as I immediately classified them as early mass adopters of the cloud computing explosion.

Rather than go into more lengthy detail of how their conversation evolved, it made me think about how I enjoy hearing the day to day challenges that IT people face, and why I like working from the solutions side of things to solve the pain points.

So I’ve compiled a short list of topics and the ultimate goal is to get your feedback. Comment and elaborate on the topics below. Create your own and fill us all in.

Do you:

- have a heavy reliance on backups?

- have the inability to consistently test and verify backup integrity?

- have outright backup failure?

- have poor or incomplete backups?

- have too many incremental backups?

- have too many full backups stored on tape offsite?

- have age and deterioration of media?

- have dated technology that cannot support the onslaught of data?

- have point solutions proving to be time consuming and ineffective in protecting your distributed network.

- have challenges with your current backup/recovery infrastructure and cannot support ongoing regulations being set forth?

- not have the ability to replicate data securely off-site?

This is just the stepping stone, and again, we want to hear from you.

At the end of every year, most businesses (well at least the better ones) will generally make a plan on how to achieve growth for the next year. More often than not, companies look to achieve this growth through new customer acquisition. Now, in order to have a thriving business, new customer acquisition is imperative. However, what about the ones (customers) you already have? For example, if you are an MSP (Managed Service Provider) offering a range of services, you need to ask yourself – how many of my existing customers are buying more than 50% of the services I offer?

Let’s look at an example of an MSP that has 5 services to offer, with 200 paying customers using 1 or more of these services. To keep this example simple, let’s say that each of the 5 services cost $100/month. Now, if less than 100 of these customers are using 3 services or less, would we not want to know why? Even if 20% of these 100 ended up buying an additional service, it would translate into $2000/month in additional revenue to the business.

Unfortunately, through past experience I’ve realized that in many cases customers don’t even know that you offer a particular type of service and hence end up buying from someone else. It’s quite a shot to the ego I know, but a good learning experience nonetheless.

At the end of the day, businesses are often surprised at the opportunity they have on hand. So remember to ask yourself – Are we maximizing the potential of our existing offerings with each and every one of our current customers? Do they know we offer additional services? Imagine the results you can achieve when you bundle such a strategy along with one of acquiring new customers!