Daystar Inc.

Managed Backup Service by Barracuda MSP: The Key to Efficiency

One of the biggest challenges for managed service providers (MSPs), who make money helping companies outsource their IT assets and business processes, is knowing which IT assets and processes they should outsource themselves. Executives at MSP Daystar Inc. found themselves asking this question a few years ago. Part of the problem was that the backup and disaster recovery (BDR) software they were using at the time was constantly sending alerts, which Daystar technicians had to spend time investigating to determine which ones were real (e.g. failed backups) and which ones could be ignored (e.g. a new backup has been completed). Switching to Barracuda MSP and taking advantage of its Managed Backup Service offering has played a key role in helping Daystar bring its labor costs down and drive its profitability up.

Barracuda MSP Proves That Business Continuity Can Be Reliable and Easy on Labor Resources

Daystar’s executive team recognized that to increase its profit margins the MSP had to become more efficient in the way it managed its customers. After assessing its business processes, it was clear where the biggest time drain was occurring: backup and data recovery (BDR) management. “Our legacy BDR was constantly generating error messages,” says Nicholas Cook, systems administrator at Daystar. “What made thingseven worse was that when we called the vendor with a support question, such as an unknown error message code, it sometimes took a couple of days just to get a response. After we finally came to terms with the fact that their service was never going to improve, we started looking for a replacement solution and came across Barracuda MSP, which had been recommended to our CTO by several business associates.”

During its recent pilot testing of Barracuda MSP’s Managed Backup, the Daystar staff liked the fact that Barracuda MSP provides Partners with an online management portal, the Barracuda ECHOplatform, which enables technicians to see all assets under management and all alerts in a single screen.” Additionally, Barracuda Intronis Backup integrates with our ConnectWise and ConnectWise Automate managed services tools, which further helps us automate and manage tickets,” says Cook. “We were also very interested in their Full-Service Backup offering, which is where Partner Service Engineers manage our customers’ backups and alert us only when there is a real problem we need to address.”

Since making the switch to Barracuda MSP, Cook says the initial setup time for new clients is literally less than half of what Daystar’s legacy BDR system took previously. “The time spent responding to backup problems has dropped by more than 75 percent, which saves us more than 100 hours a month,” he says. “What’s more, if the Partner Service Engineer notifies us of a problem, we can be certain that it’s real, such as an underlying issue with a workstation, which cuts down on our troubleshooting time. Plus, Barracuda MSP supports a broad array of backup types such as file and folder, physical images, system states, and virtual machines. Utilizing a variety of backups allows us to provide our customers with true business continuity services and fast recovery times.”

Backup Puts CryptoLocker in Its Place

About three years after Daystar started working with Barracuda MSP, a situation arose with one of its customers, a packaging plant, that put its backup to the test. “Our customer got infected with the CryptoLocker ransomware virus, which locked the customer out of all the files and business apps running on its network,” says Cook. “We received a call toward the end of the day about the problem and within minutes we were logged into the Barracuda ECHOplatform portal, assessing the situation and beginning the recovery process. Later that night, we recovered all 2 TB of the customers’ files, and they were up and running the next day with minimal disruption to their business. Had it not been for Barracuda MSP, this customer would have been looking at major financial losses that potentially could have put them out of business. They’re now big believers that ‘Daystar Data Defense,’ which is what we brand our Barracuda Intronis Backup and Data-Protection-as-a-Service business continuity service, is a well spent business insurance policy.”