Director and owner of Envisage IT Q&A with Ben Steel
Can you tell us about Envisage IT?
I started Envisage technology about 22 years ago in Brisbane as a break/fix MSP. Since then, we’ve matured to more infrastructure as a service and managed services business.
Can you tell us about the industries you target?
Our client base is primarily in the medical vertical, so we work with a lot of specialists and doctors, and we host their medical data. So security, resilience, and reliability of backups is really important to us. One of the challenges we faced was, as the team grew and the client base grew, the management of our backups and infrastructure became almost a full-time job for a senior resource and we had some concerns on the reliability of being able to restore from those backup systems. It was also the amount of time it was taking to manage backups. We were managing various vendors’ backup applications and we’ve got about 300 virtual machines that we host out of our data center, so it became really clunky and obvious to us that something had to change.
Can you tell us why you switched to N‑able Backup?
The primary factor for us to move was for management in a single pane of glass for our backups across platforms including VM Ware or Hyper-V, and on-prem servers. That was a big element, and when we think about accountability for internal staff members, managing backups, and expecting them to log into three or four different platforms to check and monitor just became a clunky process.
The second element was reliability. We found that with our previous vendor, the backups were really impacting performance for our clients. Due to the nature of the system’s design, the snapshots were affecting performance of our servers.
And then thirdly and most importantly, the ability to restore. We had occasions where backups reported as working, but when we would go to recover them, we had challenges through the process. Part of that is also the speed of recovery. The vendor we used had a great sales story around the ability of their backup and their EDR, but in a practical sense it just didn’t add up for us. We value our vendor partnership just like we value our clients, but we felt we weren’t getting the support we needed from that partnership. It just so happened that N‑able reached out to us about backups on a day that I was trying to restore a server, and that was the start of the conversation that led us to the partnership we have today.
What was the onboarding, set up, and deployment process like with N‑able Backup?
We went through a pre-sales process with Winston Zhuo from N‑able in Sydney, and we took a deep dive with some technical resources to understand exactly what was needed to set everything up properly, so we could achieve what was important to us. We also compared N‑able up against several vendors. We thought, if we’re going to do this, we’ve got to go to market and see what else is out there. What really drew us to N‑able Backup was the ease of installation and the ease of setup. When comparing N‑able Backup to competitors, it really stood out as a powerful tool with an impressive portal, that was simplified and easy to deploy. We budgeted on a three-month ramp-up period, where we would roll out N‑able Backup whilst having our other services in parallel. We’ve rolled out over 250 virtual machines in the last six to eight weeks with very little headache. So, the next stage for us is implementing the VDR solution with continuous restore for selected servers.
N‑able Backup has also created a sales opportunity for us. Previously we offered an all-inclusive backup service, whereas now we can customise our backups to suit the certain client requirements and set up different backup profiles. For example, a client in the medical space may want to keep data for 18 years, but another client may only want to keep it for five years. So, we can now build flexible plans and filter that through to our sales pipeline, which is something we haven’t been able to do before.
Do you build different plans that meet your customers’ needs and then sell them at different prices accordingly?
Yes, and the options that then come with that. So, for a group of our clients who can’t afford to have any downtime, we now have the ability of selling a continuous VDR solution to them with very quick restore times, and we can charge for that, which is certainly good for business and good for the client. The thing that really sets N‑able Backup apart is a simple pricing model. It’s not overly complicated, and the storage allowances are pooled, which made it easy for us to compare the costs when we were looking at what we were spending in time, as well as the licensing costs of the previous vendors.
You mentioned you were using Veeam with the cloud repository. Has it made your life better or easier to have the cloud storage included and managed by the same person, rather than having two different vendors?
Yes, absolutely. Now I feel much more comfortable knowing we’ve got one vendor responsible for this, as well as the ability to test and restore, and do our other usual testing plans. This is very helpful from a costing and management perspective because we just need to focus on a single relationship with N‑able, rather than having to build relationships between multiple vendors.
Are you using the automated recovery testing feature in N‑able Backup?
Yes, we are. The recovery testing feature offers additional value for some of our clients, especially our medical clients, who have certain responsibilities when it comes to privacy and protection of their patient data. So, for the clients that require regular auditing, this is an add-on service we can automate, include in our monthly reporting, and a way for them to tick the box of compliance. We’re pretty early on in the journey, but as time goes by, we’ll certainly be able to integrate the recovery testing feature more, either into the managed services plans or as an add-on feature to our backup as a service.
Do you ever have any trouble convincing your customers that Microsoft 365 needs backing up? Or were they already doing that?
Most of our clients were already backing up their Microsoft 365 data, but some clients assumed that Microsoft was taking care of that for them. We’re quite proactive in educating our clients that this is not the case, and that we do need to have a backup and security attached to a tenancy.
You mentioned that the backup product you were previously using, made it almost a full-time job for a senior tech. Have you seen a change in terms of the level of seniority of the person that’s able to manage the backups now?
When it comes to recovery, restore, and management of backups, it used to require a level-three resource prior to using N‑able Backup. We’ve now done the N‑able training for all our staff and everyone is comfortable being able to restore and manage backups with the solution. So, it’s requiring a lower-level resource but, more importantly, it’s requiring far less time. A good story that triggered our initial conversation with Winston Zhuo (N‑able sales manager) was a situation we had a few weeks ago, where we had multiple VM’s go down, which we looked at as a test case for recovery. We were using a Shadow Protect backup there for a server with a local storage vault, but at that stage were only backing up with N‑able to the cloud without a local storage vault. So, we were intrigued to see two VM’s restoring using two different vendors, one local at our data center and one in the cloud. The timing of the N‑able Backup recovery was actually faster than restoring from our local storage vault for the competitor. This demonstrated the ability to quickly recover with N‑able Backup, without even having a local storage vault, and to be able to efficiently spin up the machine and configure the networking. This means the client would be happy and back up and running in a very quick scenario. My infrastructure team are now coming to me saying, “Wow, this is so much easier and so much faster”. As a business owner, it’s important to me when my techs are singing the praise of the of the vendor and the setup. That prompted me to reach out to Winston Zhuo to thank him, and to say that we look forward to building a stronger relationship with him and N‑able.
Do you have a sense of how much the time difference is like? And have you quantified the time you have saved, or do you just have a general sense that it’s less?
We haven’t quantified it, but we were dealing with daily backup issues in the past with the infrastructure team, which could be at an entire data center level. We manage three data centers, so one backup appliance having issues with multiple clients might take up half his day to recover and get those backups running again. So, my feeling is it’s far less time. It’s difficult to put that into a specific number of hours, but we’re certainly spending much less time on backups per month. We’re only spending 10 to 15 minutes just checking in and making sure things are working.
One of the key factors for us was during the onboarding process, where we had that handholding exercise of a technical resource at N‑able who could help guide us through the process. And if we ran into challenges, we had someone we could call, which was definitely one of the best parts of onboarding. We also engaged with another MSP that moved to N‑able Backup that were of a similar size to us based in Melbourne. Winston gave me their details as a reference. That MSP was in a very similar situation to us. I was concerned around how quickly we could ramp up and what impact that was going to have on our virtual machines, but this MSP really put my mind at ease. They easily onboarded about 250 virtual machines in just two weeks and quickly deployed agents through their RMM tool. This was a similar experience to mine—things just worked. I found myself logging into the portal just to see the servers come online, see a completed backup, and see no failures, which is something I haven’t seen for a while—it was very satisfying.
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