Australian managed services provider, Geek Pty Ltd, has won an international award for deploying a solution which saved an Adelaide accounting firm $150,000 and six hours of downtime.
Geek founder and chairman, Jon Paior, said the customer called for aid after getting hit by a CryptoLocker scam, an all too common occurrence in Australia.
“This client had bought the backup appliance on our advice, hoping to never need it,” he said.
Less than one week later disaster struck as one of the company’s staff members fell victim to a cyber-criminal when they opened an AGL-branded scam email that contained ransomware.
All the company’s files were encrypted including the main database containing all the firm’s customer information.
“Using the appliance, we had them back up and running within 15 minutes,” Paior explained.
“Being an accounting firm, they later calculated that their old backup product would have taken at least six hours to fully restore those terabytes of data.
"With 120 employees, each hour of downtime would have cost them about $25,000, so the instant restore meant the return on their investment in the Datto business continuity solution was immense.”
Geek was recently awarded the Golden Datto Pioneer of the Year award for its success deploying solutions in the local market.
The MSP employs 17 people to support business networks and systems for clients throughout Australia. Jon Paior and Geek managing director, Giovanni Tirimacco, travelled to Nashville, Tennessee to receive the Golden Datto at DattoCon16, Datto’s annual partner summit.
Paior said Geek had worked with Datto to customise their product for the Australian market. “As well as a local presence, the right pricing and local data centres, we requested new features in the product that directly responded to the needs of Australian customers,” he said.
“These include customisable off-site replication, which means we can back up data to more flexible locations, and file-based backups, addressing the fact that customers have to pay for bandwidth in Australia.”
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Accelerating return on investment
Geek has been selling the Datto product since mid-2015 after being introduced to the company and its offerings at a peer to peer networking event for MSPs as the company’s founder and chairman, Jon Paior, explained.
“It fills a massive hole in the business continuity market because the market leaders in the space are selling backup and not business continuity,” he said.
Geek IT services more than 200 clients and was using another backup product to service its customers. Paior explained that due to various threats and deletions experienced by clients, the MSP was performing two to three restores a day across its client base.
“It was taking a lot of time, a lot of our resources and costing our customers due to the amount of downtime.
Shortly after being introduced to the product, the Geek team went over to New Orleans in June of last year to better understand the product. During the trip It became the first Australian company to be certified by Datto.
Paior explained that the system performs so well because it configures all the pre-virtualisation of the servers prior to completing a backup and thus takes a fraction of the time to restore a system than the company’s previous offering was capable of.
“If you have a failure, you call Geek up, we log on to our Cloud portal, press go and your server starts booting in that virtual environment. It is literally a 30 second process.”
