Enterprises looking to accelerate cloud adoption are increasingly turning to managed service providers (MSPs) with innovative solutions. Canadian-based cloud services leader, Stage2Data, quickly realized that it needed a comprehensive data management platform with multitenant features and robust security to grow its offerings and continue to delight customers. Since partnering with Cohesity, Stage2Data has increased revenue and accelerated customer acquisition while improving recovery service-level agreements (SLAs), boosting staff productivity, and driving scale.
The challenges
Stage2Data introduced cloud backup as a service (BaaS) in 2017. In 2019, Stage2Data sought to expand its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) business using VMware vCloud Director. With this expansion, the MSP aimed to rapidly integrate vCloud Director for disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and other cloud subscriptions as well as to expand its leading network recovery as a service (NRaaS) offering. The company needed a technology partner that could go beyond the traditional VMware ESXi environment to easily introduce tenant self-service options and other offerings.
“We moved our customers to Cohesity to benefit from the technology pioneer’s robust data protection strategy that is easy to use and offers tight security and superior support. With Cohesity, we have confidence that our data on Cohesity’s data management platform is optimally protected from ransomware attacks. The migration has helped us increase our top and bottom lines; we have completed more sales in three months with Cohesity than in the last four years with Rubrik and we just keep growing.”
Stephen Pyott, Chief Revenue Officer, Stage2Data
To realize Stage2Data’s growth plans, a technology partner had to come on board that could ensure rapid virtual machine (VM) recovery and be flexible in its approach, allowing the MSP the freedom to source hardware from its providers of choice while offering outstanding technical support.
Consequently, Stage2Data began to look at alternate solutions to grow its business, seeking a platform that could solve not only backup challenges but support multiple data management use cases. It discovered the ideal solution was Cohesity.
“When we saw Cohesity, it really opened our eyes to what we were missing. The Cohesity multi-cloud data management platform—which could underpin a variety of data services—had the potential to open up so many more revenue streams across our customer base,” according to Stephen Pyott, CRO of Stage2Data. “For example, we could deploy a file service offering based on the Cohesity platform to our backup customers as an additional source of revenue.”
Solution
Since adopting Cohesity, Stage2Data has dramatically expanded its range of data management services—from backup to DR to file archiving. All of its as-a-service offerings are delivered through Cohesity’s multi-cloud data management platform. The MSP currently has Cohesity deployed to serve healthcare providers, municipalities, and other organizations.
Cohesity is tightly integrated with vCloud Director to streamline data recovery and Stage2Data has found Cohesity’s platform to be exceptionally efficient. Stage2Data engineers say the erasure coding and space savings in Cohesity’s platform are the best of any solution, bar none.
Beyond providing greater efficiency, the Cohesity platform is easier to manage. Cohesity delivers global management for complete visibility. “What’s amazing is that we’re actually able to remotely see and take actions globally, directly from the Cohesity Helios dashboard. Cohesity is a unified solution that’s simpler for our customers and our business,” Pyott says.
Leveraging Cohesity’s platform, Stage2Data is backing up multiple data sources for customers including VMware and Microsoft 365. The MSP has deployed Cohesity Helios to simplify unstructured data management. The platform’s multi-layered security capabilities, including anti-ransomware features, help the MSP keep customer data secure and recoverable in the case of cyberattacks.
Cohesity collapses data and infrastructure silos into a single, software-defined platform that reduces the overall attack surface. The immutable file system built into Cohesity backups, hidden catalog and repository, DataLock (WORM), secure data transfer, multi-factor authentication, and granular role-based access protection layers help prevent external systems from compromising backups while policy-based, automated modern data isolation serves as additional protection. “Hands down, we feel safer with Cohesity. In our tenure with Cohesity, we haven’t incurred any corrupted data or data loss,” Pyott says.
With Cohesity, Stage2Data has the freedom and flexibility to procure the hardware it wants from the vendors it chooses to grow its business. “Cohesity is not in the hardware business and does not lock MSPs into buying hardware with pre-configured size requirements from one distributor,” Pyott adds.
Cohesity delivered predictable, across-use-case pricing per terabyte (TB), facilitating IT modernization as well as the rapid rollout of new services such as Microsoft 365 backups that don’t require switching to a per-user license model. Pyott believes that this flexibility has opened a lot of doors for Stage2Data. “We’re able to tell customers ‘move your data wherever you want or simply add a new workload, the bill is fundamentally the same,’” he says.
Results
Stage2Data has significantly improved its top and bottom lines with Cohesity. Made aware by the MSP that Cohesity is protecting their data, customers are happy, too. “The team at Stage2Data made backup and recovery easy and more productive for us. We can see daily how data management has been simplified across all our office locations. Cohesity’s enterprise-class backup and recovery solution also protects our data against human errors, malware, and other forms of corruption with rapid recovery at scale to any point in time. Stage2Data offered us the best mix of price and value with a simplified approach to data management,” said Ron Thorsteinson, IT Infrastructure Manager for Copperfin Credit Union.
Simple to deploy and use, Cohesity has enabled Stage2Data to boost employee productivity and morale, and cut capital costs as it doubles down on its business. The MSP rolled out Cohesity in Canada before opening a data center in the U.S. and creating an international footprint it can manage from Canada. “It’s unfair to compare Cohesity to any other backup solution because Cohesity offers far more and is far superior,” according to Pyott.
Key to Stage2Data’s success has been Cohesity’s obsession with customer satisfaction. A simplified data management approach has led to fewer support tickets and the Cohesity model aligns with the MSP’s need to meet customer SLAs at scale. “Cohesity support is immensely fast, and we get to the right people, right away,” says Pyott. “Out of our group of data vendors, which is fairly extensive, Cohesity delivers the best support. It sets the tone for the experience and creates loyalty across my team.”
With Cohesity, Stage2Data has achieved the following benefits:
• Increased revenue, closing more sales in three months with Cohesity than the four years prior
• Expanded service portfolio with support for many data management use cases and accelerated customer acquisition
• 45% boost in staff productivity because of Helios, a true multitenant platform
• 75% lower CapEx with hardware flexibility
• 20–25% improved compression and deduplication compared to other backup solutions
• Trusted ransomware protection
