Business Need
Killik & Co had been backing up their Microsoft Sharepoint and OneDrive for Business using a cloud service via another MSP, but were concerned about increasing costs. With their existing contract nearing its expiry, their I.T. Service & Support Director, Dan Young, asked Autodata to advise on a better-value solution for their entire Microsoft 365 environment.
Prior to adopting Sharepoint, Killik & Co used on-premise file servers with Azure Blob storage, but found it clunky and expensive to get their data in and out. They elected to migrate all their existing internal file data into Sharepoint, with all new departments working directly in Sharepoint i.e. without any separate network-drive access.
Killik & Co already uses Veeam for on-premise backup and replication so were keen to explore expanding its use across their cloud-based applications. Dan estimated an initial requirement of around 10TB of cloud-backup storage to support their 300+ user base.
“We required a separate M365 data backup outside of our on-premise infrastructure to guarantee disaster recovery and business continuity.
We now have the reassurance and peace of mind of Cloudlake’s secure and immutable cloud backups meaning we’re not just relying on Microsoft’s basic retention policies. I would recommend exploring Autodata’s Cloudlake SaaS Backup solution. Comparative to everything else I’ve seen, it’s great value, easy to set up, and works seamlessly in the background, which is the sort of service I’m always looking for!”
Solution
Autodata proposed our Cloudlake® SaaS Backup solution which uses Veeam’s industry leading Microsoft 365 Backup tool in conjunction with Wasabi’s flexible, reliable, low-cost,universal cloud storage, plus Autodata’s Cloudlake Managed service to provide Killik & Co with a fully managed platform.
Cloudlake harnesses the self-service functionality available with Veeam’s solution to provide an accessible, secure, high-performance service for immutable full-stack M365 backup, with UK data-centre availability, and crucially no hidden fees … no ingress, egress or API charges. Cloudlake is available on a disaggregated model, meaning you only pay for the services you want, and is invoiced on a 30-day rolling contract.
Having reviewed the commercials, Dan felt that Cloudlake’s fully-featured offering was very compelling compared to his incumbent service, providing considerable annual savings along with the flexibility to cancel at any time. He was impressed that, on top of Wasabi’s low storage cost of £5.99 per TB per month, he could also back up Microsoft Exchange and Teams without incurring extra fees for data retrieval, ensuring predictable monthly billing.
Result
Autodata’s Professional Services Team performed the set-up and onboarding: configuring a 7-year retention policy for compliance needs; planning out daily backup notification emails; and performing the initial data seeding. We then completed the linked-tenant association, resolved existing MFA conflicts and ran the full initial backup process, before performing a series of restore tests to ensure we could successfully restore all backed-up object types.
All Killik & Co’s M365 applications are now backed up on a daily basis at a cheaper cost than previously. Email notifications are sent out after every job, with a summary of how much data has been processed and from which applications. Autodata fully manages the backup operation, so it is completely hands-off for Killik & Co’s internal I.T. Team unless the daily notifications flag any issues or actions, with which we can then assist them.
In addition to their M365 applications, Killik & Co now also uses Autodata’s Cloudlake® Storage service powered by Wasabi to back up their on-premise NAS and media files, meaning they won’t need to purchase nor manage any additional NAS units.
