The Michigan-based provider of data protection and recovery solutions initially onboarded 123TB of customer data.
With Redstor’s multi-tenanted, unified application, purpose-built for MSPs and service provision, Protos has grown that figure to 546TB in a little more than two years.
Ryan Thompson, sales operations and marketing director at Protos, insists this huge increase in business would not have been possible without Redstor’s smart, scalable way to manage and protect customer data, which spans cloud and SaaS services all from a single application.
He said: “Protos was formerly known as Baseline and started out by providing DR services to organizations from a banking background, but we now service a range of sectors.
“Ensuring the security and availability of customer data is our No. 1 objective and we wanted to offer more feature-rich solutions, including backup and recovery services with preventative measures to protect against cyber threats. That also meant partnering with a vendor focused on protecting data in the broadest range of environments – now and in the future.”
Whether data is stored on laptops, servers, databases or in VMs, or in a rapidly growing range of SaaS apps, Redstor ensures it can be managed quickly and easily without partners needing to switch between different solutions and consoles.
With intuitive, light touch control over backup, recovery and management of data from a single application, Redstor enables IT teams to view data from anywhere at any time through a single app.
Ryan said: “The initial Redstor migration was 123TB of on-prem protected data, which grew rapidly with the acquisition of key larger customers.
“We subsequently added Microsoft 365 protection for our customers and are actively promoting and deploying Redstor’s artificial intelligence for the detection of malware in backups.
“Before Redstor we had a level of incumbent data protection that did not really increase. With Redstor’s portfolio we protect more sources of data which has led to significant growth.”
Easy to demo, deploy and scale, and with set-up times of under 15 minutes, Redstor is designed for MSPs managing multiple accounts, while the ability to scale protection quickly and easily has had a major impact on Protos’s rapid growth.
Ryan said: “We are able to provision additional capacity for our customers at the click of a button as their data needs increase. It is technically seamless.
“This gives us the power to deliver a pay-as-you-grow model. Adding endpoints to any customer’s tenant is just a matter of installing and configuring the necessary agent.”
Bruce McKnight, IT consultant at Protos added: “A lot of people have not yet gone to the cloud. As they do that, we say ‘in the same way that we protect your Exchange servers, we can seamlessly transition to 365 and on the same pane of glass’ and they really like that.
Protos provides disaster recovery solutions, online data protection and virtual private servers to hundreds of companies of all sizes in the United States.
Ensuring customers are always free to focus on running their core production systems is key so Protos was keen to avoid any disruption during the switch to Redstor.
The initial seeding of a customer’s infrastructure data is typically completed over the wire and with USB drives. After that the daily backup process is quick and resource light because Redstor only takes incremental backups.
When on-site backups sit on the same network as the primary infrastructure, they are susceptible to ransomware.
Redstor isolates backups in the cloud, separate from live data with an all-important ‘air-gap’, and makes regular testing of disaster recovery processes easy, giving customers confidence they can respond rapidly in a crisis.
This is done by presenting backed-up systems and data for temporary access as a virtual drive and for permanent recovery to a destination of choice.
Ryan said: “We let our customers schedule their own granular DR tests – as well as conducting our own with them.
“They see for themselves by using Redstor’s unique InstantData that they have instantaneous access to what they need and validate their own DR tests when and how they want to. It’s as if massive systems have been recovered in moments.”
With Redstor, customers eliminate downtime in the event of a disaster by immediately accessing files and information from backups or archives. InstantData ensures employees can continue working by streaming whatever is requested by a user or application, while less critical data is recovered in the background.
Redstor pricing is based on the amount of data selected for backup and archiving.
Ryan said: “The real beauty of the Redstor model is that it is designed for the cloud and the channel. There are no limits and the simple consumption-based charging is completely predictable and transparent for us and our customers.
“The ability to quickly calculate the cost of the solution, given the amount of front-end data, makes our account managers lives easier. It also makes our commercial and billing teams’ lives easier.
“As a service provider it is vital to have a level of differentiation from our competitors and the way Redstor bill – charging only for data selected and per GB for SaaS data - makes us extremely good value for money for customers with large M365 estates but lower data volumes.
“Complicated charging models, and the need for excessive up-front scoping often forms a barrier. Our customers quickly understand the benefits of Redstor and how it works.”
With customers insisting on data sovereignty, Protos needed to be able to back up into their storage environment with a cloud-agnostic solution.
Ryan said: “The ability to leverage the full suite of Redstor software features but have the flexibility to leverage the investments Protos have made in our storage infrastructure was key.
“We are able to offer state-of-the-art DCs, using a best-of-breed data protection and management software.
“We needed a future-focused, innovative partner and I am delighted we chose Redstor as we now protect M365 and Google Workspace and are excited to add protection for the highly valuable data that customers hold in Salesforce.
“Access to Redstor’s business-generating resources, including a host of pre-canned collateral, is invaluable. They are always on hand to assist with sales calls or co-authoring webinars and they are regular attendees on internal and customer calls.
“We don’t really regard Redstor as a vendor, they are a true business partner.”