Enterprise Data Concepts MSP Keeps Business Running After Natural Disaster Destruction

Veeam couldn’t meet their client recovery objectives and cyber liability insurance premiums shot up by the thousands – so Enterprise Data Concepts (EDC) moved to Axcient. Now, with both cloud and appliance-based deployment options, EDC can recover data no matter what, recurring costs are down, and the rollout took less than 30 days.

x360Recover is easy to deploy, easy to use, easy to implement. Overall, it’s a pretty slick product.

Inadequate Recovery Capabilities and Rising Costs Force BCDR Upgrade

As a Southern Louisiana-based MSP, EDC and its Chief Information Security Officer, Roddy Bergeron, prioritize disaster recovery in preparation for the total devastation often caused by natural disasters in the area. During an evaluation of their Veeam cloud in the EDC data center, Roddy asked himself, “If all of our clients were down for an extended period of time, could we spin them up in our data center?” Unfortunately, the answer was no due to limited vertical capacity within Veeam’s infrastructure. With the entirety of their client data in EDC’s data center, the recovery process from a natural disaster could take up to a week. Roddy explains, “We would have to run a lot of hardware out to our Colo. It would be pretty hard. Not a lot of people can take a week of downtime, but with our Veeam solution, we were really hamstrung on what we could do.” He goes on to say, “When it came down to total cost of ownership, liability, and security, we couldn’t engineer our Veeam product to meet those needs.”

Compounding the security and service risks of extensive downtime was EDC’s cyber liability insurance carrier. They too had noted the shortcomings of the environment and were going to make EDC pay. Roddy says, “They wanted us to pay $4,000 more per month on our premium. That’s all our money out the window!” In order to protect their clients and their MSP, EDC made the decision to leave Veeam.

x360Recover for Easy Migration and Lower Recurring Costs

EDC chose Axcient x360Recover for business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) based on pricing, data protection automation, and ease of use. Using the hardware-free deployment option, Direct-to-Cloud (D2C), and Axcient’s proprietary Chain-Free backup technology, EDC avoided a cumbersome “rip and replace” migration. Instead, they silently deployed the Axcient agent through their RMM tools, configured the backup schedule, and were immediately backing up data without needing to deactivate the existing Veeam product or reboot their servers.

When we look at the features we get with Axcient – the ability to spin up in the cloud, the retention history we get without having to add more hardware, and the costs we would have incurred with our own data center – there are significant cost savings at the end of the day. Plus, Axcient support has been phenomenal for us.

Within just 30 days, EDC had successfully deployed Axcient to all of their Veeam clients – about 90% of their total client population. From there, EDC converted their Veeam appliances to Axcient, which as Roddy says, “was very straightforward and smooth since we could do it all remotely – load an ISO, install the application – and never have to go on-site.” The combination of hardware-free deployment and the ability to repurpose their existing Veeam servers contributed to the recurring cost savings EDC has enjoyed since migrating to Axcient.

Natural Disaster Recovery in Hours – Not Days

Less than three months after EDC’s migration to Axcient, x360Recover was put to the test. Hurricane Ida left all of EDC’s 25 New Orleans clients without power or internet, but six required data recovery to maintain essential business operations. Unfortunately, EDC hadn’t yet tested the restore processes yet. Luckily, after a quick 30-minute call with Axcient support, EDC had its first client runbook running in the cloud. It was that easy. They continued to successfully spin all clients up in the Axcient cloud or public clouds, delivering on their promise of uninterrupted business continuity.

I cannot commend Axcient support enough. We’d never spun anybody up in a cloud instance before, so it was trial by fire. They held our hands and walked us through the whole process. On top of that, they didn’t charge for extra time in the cloud for our clients who couldn’t physically access their offices. It was really appreciated and reassuring for our clients.

Roddy and his team were challenged again when a client’s building caught fire shortly after partnering with EDC. Luckily, they had deployed D2C as a safety precaution after onboarding and Roddy says, “it saved their butts.” Roddy explains, “The building caught fire around 5:30 a.m. on Sunday. By the time we started recovery at 6:30 a.m., the fire department was still putting the fire out.” He continues, “We pulled their data down, provisioned a new physical piece of hardware, and spun up their server instances. On Monday we went on-site to their warehouse [in a different location] with a spare router, and by Tuesday, 80% of their staff was working like normal.” None of EDC’s clients lost any data as a result of these disasters.

It’s good to be able to get them up and running when they don’t have power or internet. With Veeam, we couldn’t spin up six clients in our data center that quick. It could have taken a week. I’m glad we moved because now I can tell clients, ‘Don’t worry, we did an automated test restore yesterday, and your data is good.’