The idea that all DRaaS solutions are the same is a common misconception. The truth is, picking the wrong solution and/or provider can have truly catastrophic consequences.
Simply having copies of data to fail back to after an unexpected outage usually means slow manual processes need to be completed. The worst part? There is a significant cost attached to this. It results in unacceptable revenue losses due to the business not being able to keep operations running during those periods.
Probax CEO Tim Smith sat down with Robin Robins (Technology Marketing Toolkit) to discuss this very topic and how Probax and Veeam can help.
In this insightful discussion, you'll discover:
- How MSPs can ensure business continuity for their clients
- The importance of rapidly failing back to minimize impact to client operations
- Why DRaaS needs to be the main game for MSPs,
- And so much more!
Transcript of the discussion with Tim Smith
Robin Robins:
Hey, folks, Robin Robins here, founder of Technology Marketing Toolkit.com. And I am here with Tim Smith, who's the CEO of Probax, and we've got a rather controversial topic to discuss. And you and I were talking prior to shooting this video, and you were saying that all the fine folks out there, the MSPs out there, who are wonderful people, we both agree are hardworking, are using inadequate backups.
So tell me why you're saying that.
Tim Smith:
Sure. Great to be here, Robin and nice to be communicating with your network. Listen, you all know as MSPs, how challenging your model is. You have two independent objectives. First and foremost, take care of your customers, right? To service their needs in a way that meets all of their data protection needs. But you also have a business to run and the way that MSPs grow and become more profitable is being able to scale.
So many of the service providers out there that are working with you are vertically integrated so they are servicing both sides of that equation. So not only are they providing the data protection platform, but they are providing the operating, the easy button, the-
Robin Robins:
For the MSPs?
Tim Smith:
... For the MSPs. So all of the ways in which they can conduct their business in an efficient, scalable way, that is what really the conversation is about often.
Robin Robins:
Yeah. So the MSPs, like you're saying though, not that these backup companies are bad companies, but they have focused on how do we enable the MSP? Not necessarily on what's the best technology for backup, right?
Tim Smith:
That's right.
Robin Robins:
And so what do you think is the best technology for backup?
Tim Smith:
Well, I think there's a lot. We are a service provider. That's what Probax does and our offerings range from disaster recovery, to hot backup, to archiving. Notwithstanding the fact that we're a service provider, we are a technology company at heart ourselves. And so we sit in a pretty interesting little corner of our market.
We service MSPs and we help them do their business in a way that we think is more efficient and helps their customers. But as an extension of that, we are engaging with some of the market leading third party applications that are out there, namely Veeam, and some others. They are not making much traction in the MSP market.
Robin Robins:
Veeam isn't?
Tim Smith:
Veeam isn't. They are viewed as too robust, to complex, not easy to work with.
Robin Robins:
But they're not trying to target MSPs. They're an enterprise level backup or?
Tim Smith:
Well, no. They would like to be in that market, but that feedback is pretty fair.
Robin Robins:
Okay.
Tim Smith:
And they acknowledge that, and that is where Probax comes in.
So the technology that we have been developing for over 10 years, at least with our founder, enables MSPs to take advantage of these market leading technologies and it matters.
Robin Robins:
So you kind of sit as the go between, between Veeam and the MSP to make it simple, easy. I know you're also vendor agnostic, so it's not just Veeam, correct?
Tim Smith:
Right.
Robin Robins:
Okay.
Tim Smith:
Right, I mean, we'll be talking about Veeam a lot in this conversation and it's a big part of our offering. Not because we necessarily have a vested interest in Veeam, it's because they are the market leader.
And we believe that MSPs should be able to take advantage of this technology for the benefit of their customers. So the question is, how can MSPs take advantage of these technologies? And yes, we are vendor agnostic, but if we're talking about Veeam, we have two parts to our technology.
Tim Smith:
We have a portal which we called Hive, and then probably what's best described as a helper, which is an automated capability that can map and bring information in the environment, in a customer's environment back back to the portal.
But not all portals are the same. So a lot of portals are aggregators for feedback, whether it's a notification or an alert or something else and that's great. There's nothing wrong with that. But the bulk of our technology is built on our ability to manage these applications. And I know this is a bold statement and we can talk about it, but we are able to do things with these technologies that they themselves either can't do or can't do very well.
Robin Robins:
Who's they, the MSPs?
Tim Smith:
MSPs taking advantage of again, a Veeam technology capability.
Robin Robins:
So why Veeam? What's so great about Veeam?
Tim Smith:
Well, that's a loaded question. Veeam is an excellent, an excellent provider and have established themselves as leaders in the market because they bring the full breadth of data protection solutions. So everything from data disaster recovery, all the way through to different kinds of backup into archiving. So in and of itself, it is a very robust platform.
Why Veeam? We believe that those capabilities, particularly on the DR side, is what's not being serviced by the service providers into MSPs in today's market.
Robin Robins:
Okay. So we were talking a little bit and I was a little surprised to think about this because you were saying, if you get most of the backup companies out there, they're backing up the data and there's failover but there's failback. And you were saying that's where Veeam really shines.
Can you explain that a little bit more?
Tim Smith:
Sure. So historically we've thought about data protection as backing up, and we've all backed up for 20, 30 years in whatever media, right? And the notion of backing up really is either a regulatory or good hygiene kind of requirement, but disaster recovery is a different form of technology. So simply backing up data is no longer sufficient in today's market, right?
As companies become more focused on e-commerce where the ramifications of being down is thousands of dollars per hour, per minute, or sometimes even per second. So disaster recovery is not just about backing up the data, but bringing you back up.
Tim Smith:
So what a lot of companies do when they market a disaster recovery offering is they are taking backups and when you go down, whether it's a disaster or now in today's world, a ransomware attack, they will recompile your instance in their data center using those backups. There's a lot of-
Robin Robins:
So it's the failover. It'll failover.
Tim Smith:
... That's the failover. Right. So disaster recovery, there's two parts to that. There's the failover, my production site is impaired, impacted somehow, I need to failover to my service provider. So there's some challenges that existing companies are using in that regard. But running your business in your service provider's data center is not what you need to be doing.
It's akin to, if you have a flat tire, you can use that donut to get you somewhere. But the objective is to get a new tire on that rim. So then there's the failback. There's getting your production back into your primary site, which is where you want to be.
Robin Robins:
Okay. And so that's where you're saying Veeam really shines, right?
Because you and I were talking and we agree a lot of MSPs haven't experienced that having to failback. Having to have a client have a complete ransomware attack, fire, tornado, whatever happens, so they have the data and they can failover, but then getting it back is where the big project is?
Tim Smith:
That's right.
Robin Robins:
And is that painful for them, the client, both? What does that look like?
Tim Smith:
Yeah, it's painful for everybody. I mean, as we were talking, it's not something that many people have experienced until recent times. We're here in Nashville, not a lot of hurricanes flow through Nashville, for example.
Robin Robins:
We've had a flood and we do have tornadoes.
Tim Smith:
Okay, I stand corrected there. But it's something that not many people think about and experience, but it is either a compliance box that is checked or is just good hygiene to have done. But people haven't experienced it until ransomware.
Now it is something that a lot of people are experiencing and now a lot of people are asking their MSP, hey, am I covered, and what's going to happen? And when you start asking just a few questions about what is that process, it becomes an ugly conversation.
So you asked a direct question, what happens? So depending on your retention period, problem number one is that what gets rebuilt is based on your retention. So it's the last backup and however long that period is. That's your starting point.
Robin Robins:
Right, so if it was backed up 24 hours-
Tim Smith:
If you have a 24-hour retention period-
Robin Robins:
... you could lose 24 hours.
Tim Smith:
... Exactly. And so that's what's happening. And so it is a process in rebuilding. And I respect some of the technologies out there, so it can get done fairly quickly.
The problem is the failback, right? So there are some solutions that can bring all of that data back to the production site, over a wire, but it is manual and it is cumbersome, and all of that data has to come back.
There are many solutions, and I would encourage you to ask your provider exactly how this is done, but a lot of times that data is brought back to your production site in a FedEx envelope, whether it's a thumb drive or a hard disc, depending on how much data. That's the process of failing back.
Robin Robins:
So it's like a car arrives, but it's all in pieces?
Tim Smith:
Yes.
Robin Robins:
And so they have to reassemble the whole car?
Tim Smith:
Correct. Whereas with Veeam, and again, Veeam's not alone. It's just Veeam is a market leader in true disaster recovery, right? And Veeam, Zerto, which was bought by HP, there are premium companies that do DR in this way, which is having those instances running simultaneously.
So as you failover, Veeam is managing those incrementals, so the process back. So first of all, the failover is automatic and the failback is a very efficient process.
Robin Robins:
Okay. And that's where you guys come in. So talk a little bit more about, I know you mentioned some, but talk about Probax. Where do you fit in this?
Tim Smith:
So we're an enabler, right? And so we are very proud of our partners capabilities. And again, everything that we've been talking about has been largely about their technology leadership. Our technology leadership is enabling that to happen.
So what our portal does and what we do with that portal is that we manage that technology in a very interesting and powerful way, we are provisioning it. We are, with our technology, we are creating very elegant ways to deliver some of the needs of an MSP that Veeam itself can't do, for example.
Say provisioning a license. So for those of you who have worked with Veeam, provisioning a license is a little bit of a challenging process. A few clicks, you can provision a license, right? And some of the most gratifying experiences that we have with new customers and customer prospects is just procuring a license.
And again, it's one of many things we can automatically provision customers. We are integrated with ConnectWise and other CRM and RNM capabilities.
So we know MSPs. Our founder started as an MSP. So the early derivations of Probax was an MSP. So our founder really understood here's this problem statement that MSPs are dealing with and with the knowledge of StorageCraft with Veeam, Dropbox, O365, he and his team have been able to create this really powerful technology that bridges these two needs.
Robin Robins:
And my understanding is that from your platform, they can manage all the different vendor, Veeam being one of them, but they can all their different backups in one pane of glass, in one place.
Tim Smith:
Yeah, that's right. So if you look at most of the competitors, as they do a good job managing their solution, but there's no way for them to manage another provider. So we don't need to get into it, but the way in which we are able to affect this technology is using metadata, but that is available with lots of different technologies.
So an MSP can take advantage of different technologies and listen, we don't live in a binary world, MSPs have customers that some are happier than others with legacy technologies. And so the ability for them to bring on new customers with cutting edge technology, while maintaining their legacy customers, and then over time, they can seamlessly manage them in one pane of glass, very efficiently.
All the billing are integrated. The tickets, you name it, all integrated together.
Robin Robins:
I mean, for me, I think the most important thing MSPs should be asking themselves with the ransomware attacks that are happening, not just to their customers, which could happen, but also... I mean, we know of the recent with the Kaseya hack that happened.
A lot of MSPs got hit by that, got impacted by that. The ones that were impacted now, they're having to restore all of their clients at one time, which is, I mean, I know I've talked to some of these guys. They're suicidal.
I mean, they're like, this is going to undo my business. And so I think it's a good time for all of you out there to just even say to ourselves, if we had to do a failover and failback and restore a client's entire network, ransomware attack, nobody's above it. You know what I mean? Nobody's above it.
Would we be able to do it and what would happen if it was multiple at one time? Because not too long ago, one of our members, John Motazedi, who's in Joplin, Missouri had an F5 tornado rip through Joplin. Every one of his customers were impacted. So it wasn't just, oh, this file got lost. It was, we have to restore 40, 50, 60, 100 customers, right? All at once. And how do you do that?
So I think it's worth checking this out because leave no stone unturned or just even go back to your current solutions and say, if we had to do this, what would that look like? What would it entail? Are we staffed? Are we prepared to do this? Could we do it? How quickly could we do it?
And to your point, there may be some customers that meh, maybe they could be down for two, three days, and it's not a big deal. But there's other customers they can't be down for two, three days.
Tim Smith:
That's right. There's that cliche about lawyers never asking a question to a witness on the stand that they don't know the answer to, right? Well, you guys, you don't want to be asking your customers these questions unless you've got a good answer.
And when you start peeling back the layers of the onion and understanding some of the technologies that you're working with again, good enough. Good enough is in the eye of the beholder. I think not everybody has a problem, as you rightly said, with the solutions that you're working with, but at least have those conversations and have an answer and have an option.
Robin Robins:
Be aware. Yeah, exactly. Be aware of what you're going into-
Tim Smith:
That's right.
Robin Robins:
... and look at different options. So if somebody wanted to check this out and see what you guys do, where do they go, what would they get?
Tim Smith:
Right. So I think there's a landing page that'll be identified in this video. It's probax.io/robin. And in that you're going to see a five minute video that we use as a demo. It actually was created as an instruction video for new customers. But I guarantee you, everything that we've been talking about, you will believe when you see how it's executed in five minutes of your time. And from there we'd love to engage with you in any way possible to help you and help you get down this path.
Robin Robins:
It's worth checking out for sure. So Probax. P-R-O-B-A-X.io/robin. We'll put the link below-
Tim Smith:
Great.
Robin Robins:
... just in case. All right, thank you. All right.
Tim Smith:
Thank you.
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