“A lot has changed since we started in 2005. Today, there are a lot of regulation issues to be concerned with. Wasabi and MSP360’s compliance with HIPAA/HITECH security and privacy rules gives us the confidence to deliver backup services to our healthcare clients.”

– Hank Holbrook, Founder & President of BlueSky Technologies

Overview

With a primary focus in the medical field, BlueSky Technologies provides monitored data protection and technical support for over 300 customers across the United States. BlueSky delivers a “concierge” backup service which differentiates them from their competition. “We are very proactive. We’ll watch to make sure that our customers have successful backups. If they don’t, we’ll call them, and we’ll fix it. Many of our customers are happily surprised when they get a proactive call about a backup issue, as they’re used to finding and dealing with problems after they occur. It’s a great business model for us. We’ve made a lot of people happy over the years.”

Challenge: Delivering affordable, fast, and compliant data storage

Electronic record systems, advanced imaging solutions, and smart medical devices are helping doctors and clinicians improve decision making and deliver better patient outcomes. This digital information is vitally important, and many organizations struggle to keep pace with skyrocketing data growth. Traditional, on-site data storage platforms are notoriously expensive to deploy, scale, and manage. They require significant upfront capital investments, pricey maintenance contracts, and specially trained IT staff.

BlueSky Technologies was one of the first IT Service Providers to foresee the value of the cloud for backing up data. “When I got started, tapes and disk drives were still pretty popular, but they didn’t work all the time. We knew our customers needed something different, so that’s why we started BlueSky,” said Holbrook. “We were one of the first IT specialists to look to the cloud, but there were not a lot of cloud products available, and the ones we reviewed delivered incomplete solutions, at best.”

First-generation cloud storage services like Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) / Glacier eliminate equipment expense and complexity, but were still too costly, and lacked the performance needed for BlueSky customers. “Doctor’s office many times have slow internet access speeds, so when they try to do backups and restores, the combination of slow access and slow cloud storage meant that often the backup or restore process would fail.”

Solution: Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage and MSP360 Managed Backup

Wasabi has partnered with MSP360 to help businesses reduce storage and data protection costs and complexity, while allowing unlimited data growth.

Wasabi hot cloud storage is incredibly cost-effective and fast cloud object storage that can be used for any purpose; including backup storage. Placing your backups in the cloud adds a layer of disaster recovery for customers when compared to on-prem storage, by protecting against hardware failures, natural disaster, theft, accidental deletion, and malware.

MSP360 Managed Backup Service allows IT Service Providers to easily manage backups across all their customers from a single pane of glass. Combined with Wasabi hot cloud storage, MSPs can deliver cloud backup services and fully-encrypted, HIPAA/HITECH compliant cloud backups to their customers at a price they can afford, while still maintaining profit margins; a perfect combination to protect business critical data.

Wasabi is deployed in fully secure and redundant data centers that are certified for SOC-2 and ISO 27001 compliance. The service provides robust security to maintain the privacy of protected health information, ensuring HIPAA and HITECH compliance in the United States. Wasabi supports comprehensive user authentication and access control mechanisms and strong data-at-rest encryption to safeguard stored data. In addition, all communications with Wasabi are encrypted using HTTPS to protect data in transit.

Results

In 2018, BlueSky Technologies switched to MSP360 and Wasabi for their managed cloud backup service. “It’s a heck of a lot faster. It allows our team to get in and get out quickly. The medical firms can focus on their customers and we can move onto the next job. Knowing that all of the compliance measures are in place is comforting,” says Holbrook. “Another benefit is that the sales cycle is extremely shortened and the combination of MSP360 and Wasabi has allowed BlueSky to pursue larger customers. Last year we saved over 50% on cloud costs. I saw the comparisons and I knew I picked a winning combination. We’re growing our business significantly and we sleep well because of MSP360 and Wasabi.”