In 2020, VirtuIT Systems had the best problem an MSP could ask for: it had more work than it could handle. When the COVID-19 pandemic forced many companies to work remotely, few businesses were prepared to support remote workers. Companies turned to VirtuIT for guidance. 

As these companies adopted cloud services, scalability became a major need. “Customers needed to scale faster than we could,” said VirtuIT’s Sales Director, Joshua Lee. “At the rate we brought on customers during 2020 and 2021, we couldn’t keep up.” VirtuIT had to expand its toolset and streamline operations to serve its growing clientele. 

To find a cloud storage solution for their rapidly growing customer portfolio, VirtuIT turned to Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage via the recommendation of Veeam, the MSPs current backup provider. 

Creating comprehensive data protection strategies with Wasabi 

Wasabi enables Lee and the VirtuIT team to better serve their customers – and not just by offering affordable cloud storage. “Ransomware was an extremely prevalent concern, as it still is. Every company needs to protect its data – and to accomplish that goal within their budget constraints,” Lee said. Leveraging Wasabi as an offsite location for cloud backups is a key differentiator for VirtuIT, and Wasabi’s native protection features and compliances reassure VirtuIT customers that their data is stored with defense-in-depth security. 

“We hold the SOC-II certification at VirtuIT because we handle customers’ data,” said Lee. “However, we can also show them that Wasabi is compliant with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), among many others.” 

Wasabi’s native data protection features help customers further protect their data. Object lock, which is available to Wasabi customers at no additional cost, prevents revisions or deletions of stored data with immutability. Object Lock’s immutability enables a legal hold that prevents the modification or deletion of an object indefinitely until the hold is removed. Today, about 90% of the MSP’s customers have an object lock bucket with Wasabi as part of their retention strategy. 

Additionally, Wasabi customers aren’t burdened with additional fees for egress when retrieving data. “Competing storage solutions charge you per gigabyte or per terabyte to egress data, but Wasabi doesn’t,” Gary McConnell, CEO at VirtuIT Systems, pointed out. As a result, VirtuIT can highlight the cost-benefit: “If something goes wrong, customers don't have to pay to restore backups.” 

Simplifying the bottom line with Wasabi Account Control Manager 

To better understand and manage customers’ data use, VirtuIT uses Wasabi Account Control Manager, which gives the MSP a top-down perspective into their storage under management. “That's given us a lot better insight into individual customer usage and has made it easier for us to manage those as well,” Lee said. The web-based management console rolls billing, account creation, and administration for all their clients into a single Control Account.  “As an MSP, we're able to bill a lot more accurately than we were previously,” he said. “It's actually led to some additional sales opportunities for us where we've had a few customers that were using a little more storage than we thought, or they were scaling a little faster than we thought they were going to, where we've been able to capture some more revenue.” 
 
Budgeting is a much easier conversation, too, because VirtuIT can be transparent about its pricing model, said McConnell. “We can show them what storage costs look like now and what it’s going to look like three years from now.” 

Closing 

In the past three years that VirtuIT has been storing data with Wasabi, the amount of data that the MSP backs up has grown 4X, said McConnell. “It's because the customers trust the solution.” From McConnell’s perspective, this growth is enabled by a strong partnership with their cloud storage vendor, “I consider a successful partnership based on how the partner helps our team sell and fulfill for our customers. Wasabi hits both buckets.”