Modern Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Delivers Efficient Backup Management and Confidence

When Legacy Solutions Start Falling Short for BCDR Reliability

Voiko Tanev, the Founder and CEO of Digital Seattle, an MSP, and MSSP, had been with his backup and disaster recovery (BCDR) provider for over 10 years before a series of mishaps and a noticeable shift in focus forced him to seek something better. “I have to admit that they were the best solution originally, but somehow down the road, they lost their desire to focus on constantly innovating and constantly improving their product. They lost their advantage slowly because they kind of lost sight of their solution,” Voiko explains.

Unfortunately, Digital Seattle was experiencing the results of the provider’s waning interest in improvement. After a massive global crypto attack, a high volume of recovery requests revealed that the provider was not sizing their cloud solution resources properly. Voiko describes the incident, “Their [Legacy BCDR provider] data center was unreachable for several days, including their phones. They underestimated the need, the proper resource application, the training, and the planning. It was extremely scary for us because access to cloud backup and recovery is a lifesaver. That is your last resort.” Despite their apologies and reassurance, another incident occurred, this one being a major human error blunder on their end. Voiko says, “That was eye-opening for me. When you talk about disaster recovery, there’s a very low tolerance for mistakes. This is a high bar environment.”

On top of the accidents was legacy, chain-based backups that proved insufficient for fast recovery. Patrick Salt, the Technology Architect at Digital Seattle, describes the tedious process, “When you’d try and do a restore, it was very slow because it would have to go through all of the links in the chain. Or occasionally, you’d have an issue where one of the links was corrupt, and you’d have to take a whole new base image and then reseed it. And that was almost always their go-to answer for tickets: ‘rebase it.’ When you have clients with three or four or five terabytes of data to rebase and reseed to the cloud – it’s not something you want to be doing three times in a month, which was sometimes the case.”

Mistakes and inefficient technology came to a head for Digital Seattle when an issue at the vendor’s data center accidentally deleted client backups. Patrick says, “They had no backups of their infrastructure on their end, so they kind of just wiped out our cloud backups for 12 clients and just said, ‘we’ll send you a seed drive.’ That was it. It was very much like, ‘oh, well it happened, whatever.’” To recover, Digital Seattle had to reseed all of the clients’ cloud backups with the vendor’s chain-based technology – which required a significant amount of time and resources. After 10 years of service, Digital Seattle decided it was time to find a new vendor.

The Problem

• Legacy BCDR tools struggle to provide protection from today’s sophisticated cyberthreats.
• Chain-based backup requires time-consuming reseeding that increases downtime.
• Manual backup management tasks increase costs and resources without adding value

The Solution

• MSP-only vendors regularly update and launch new product features based on the current cyberattack trends.
• Chain-Free backup technology eliminates reseeding to ensure near-instant recovery.
• Automated and innovative features decrease vendor management, which increases profits and margins.

The Results

• Sleeping soundly knowing your MSP and your clients can recover from anything.
• Accelerated recovery to a 15-minute RPO and less than 1-hour RTO.
• Reduced the amount of time and resources needed to manage backups and vendor processes.