In the MSP world, choosing to work with a new vendor is not a decision to be taken lightly. First, you have to ensure interoperability with you and your client’s existing systems, and that the business case exists to justify the decision.

In 2010, Heartland Business Systems (HBS) decided to standardize their backup service offering on Asigra Cloud Backup^TM to meet a growing demand from SMBs who needed to replace their legacy backup systems. Many of their customers were still physically transporting tapes to an off-site backup location, raising concerns about data security and chain of custody.

With over 150 engineers working in the field across four states, HBS needed a solution that was easy to deploy at customer sites without additional help from data

center staff. HBS’ customers commonly had complex IT environments, involving systems from VMware, Microsoft, Oracle and more. Asigra, as a multi-tenant, platform-agnostic backup solution provided the flexibility HBS was looking for. Asigra’s replication capabilities enabled HBS to maintain two copies of customer data at all times, in their Little Chute, WI and Green Bay, WI datacenters.

Cost was also an important concern. Besides the convenience factor, one of the big promises of moving backup to the cloud was cost savings. During HBS’ partnership, Asigra introduced the Recovery License Model^® (RLM) rewarding MSPs who recover less data with lower licensing fees. HBS’ typical customer recovered only a small fraction of their data each year. By passing on the savings under Asigra’s RLM to their customers, HBS was able to gain a competitive edge in the marketplace.

The latest innovation that helped HBS reach its cost reduction goals was the Asigra Converged Backup Appliance for MSPs. HBS was one of our first adopters in 2015, purchasing two appliances with a total of 32 TB billable capacity. Dave Cummings, a Data Center Systems Engineer at HBS, was immediately impressed with the performance of Asigra’s Linux FreeBSD-based appliances compared to their existing Windows systems. From a business standpoint, the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of the appliances were favorable to running Asigra software on their own vault infrastructure from Dell or HP. Month-to-month, the data storage costs run about 1¢/GB, in-line with the estimates that Asigra provided to HBS during product evaluation.  

Heartland Business Systems’ experience with Asigra is a perfect example how new partners can go-to-market quickly with our solution and profitably grow their investment over time. Do you want to create your own success story expanding into cloud backup managed services? Read our case study to see what factors contributed to HBS’ success or talk to a Recoverability Specialist today.