case study
Australian MSP Office Solutions IT Migrates Service from Self-Hosted Private Cloud to Wasabi
Office Solutions IT (OSIT) is an IT services provider that offers technical support and cybersecurity to businesses across Australia. The 150-member team is spread across six locations with a headquarters in Perth, Australia.
Two of OSIT’s most popular offerings are Microsoft 365 services and backup-as-a-service. Nearly all the company’s managed service clients have backup as part of their service, with Veeam and Veeam O365 backup as key solutions. Previously, OSIT stored the backup data on a mix of public cloud storage and a private cloud they managed themselves.
Wasabi Partner Stories: Office Solutions I.T. + Veeam
Challenge: Self-hosted private cloud strains to scale
As the company grew, the amount of data OSIT was taking in began to outpace their storage capacity. Managing their own data center quickly became untenable.
The continuation of backup service was crucial, both to OSIT and their customers. It is one of the company’s most popular services and an essential function to their customer base. OSIT’s Chief Technology Officer Chris Hanson explained, “Backups are important. If you're going to buy anything buy backup, Without it, should a disaster occur, you're going to be in trouble.” The company needed a scalable storage solution that their large Veeam install base could continue to use unimpeded.
Solution: Wasabi simplifies storage and streamlines migration
OSIT was introduced to Wasabi through their representative at Veeam who suggested it as a low-cost option for a scalable backup repository. Wasabi is an existing Veeam partner, and Veeam 12’s ability to store directly to object storage made the integration straightforward. “Partnering with Wasabi has really simplified our setup quite a lot, which is really important for us as an MSP,” said Hanson. “We wanted our solution to be as streamlined as possible, keep it simple and reliable, and then also scale with the business.”
OSIT was able to relieve its private cloud and begin migrating its backup customers to Wasabi. More than 50% of OSIT’s customers have migrated to Wasabi, with the rest of the migrations currently underway.
For customer data that was stored in public cloud storage, OSIT leveraged Wasabi Cloud Sync Manager, Wasabi’s cloud-to-cloud migration service. With Cloud Sync Manager, Wasabi seamlessly transfers data from a public cloud storage provider directly to a Wasabi bucket, handling the complexity that can often come from exiting the public cloud. “For us it was quite an easy experience,” said Hanson. “All we needed to do was set up where data was coming from and where it was going in Wasabi, and Wasabi made it all happen.”
The Veeam-Wasabi solution is a natural fit for OSIT, as their two main service-offerings are Microsoft 365 and backup-as-a-service. “Both Veeam and Wasabi have been pivotal in wrapping our own solution around our backup services,” said Hanson. “And if we have questions or want to build something custom, they're always willing to come on board and help us achieve that.”
One of those custom functions was the option to add immutability to their customers’ backup using Wasabi’s S3 Object Lock. The addition of immutability gives OSIT’s customers greater protection from ransomware and other cyber-attacks. “For us, that immutability piece is definitely a key driver going forward at the moment,” said Hanson.
Results: cost-savings with rapid ROI
Since adopting Wasabi, OSIT has no longer struggled to maintain adequate backup capacity. The expense and headache of operating their own storage was replaced by a scalable solution that decreased overall complexity. “Maintaining your own storage infrastructure, it's quite a large overhead for us as an MSP to work through,” said Hanson. “So being able to simplify that whole solution has reduced the overhead for us and simplified the solution for our clients. It becomes more reliable and ultimately more scalable as well.”
With the cost savings of moving to Wasabi from our private cloud backups, it ensures that we can keep our backup pricing for our clients competitive without the need to pass on significant and increasing costs related to public cloud storage, hardware, and labor overheads into the future.”
- Chris Hanson, Chief Technology Officer, Office Solutions IT
Offloading their public cloud storage to Wasabi yielded considerable cost savings for the organization. “We calculated based on how much data we had in the public cloud and how costs would’ve grown if we stored in public cloud for the next three, five years versus moving into Wasabi,” Hanson said. “Thankfully, preparing our budget with Wasabi is quite easy due to its pricing model, and we're able to see return on investment three months after data to Wasabi.” OSIT’s use of Wasabi Cloud Sync Manager streamlined the migration process, making the transition process simple and cost-effective for OSIT. “It was a no-brainer to use the Cloud Sync Manager,” said Hanson. “With the cost savings of moving to Wasabi from our private cloud backups, it ensures that we can keep our backup pricing for our clients competitive without the need to pass on significant and increasing costs related to public cloud storage, hardware, and labor overheads into the future.”
The switch to Wasabi did not cost OSIT in performance, either. “We see that performance has increased: backups are performing quicker, and we can do restores quicker,” said Hanson.
What’s next?
Going forward, OSIT’s immediate focus will be on completing their customers’ migration to Wasabi. “But we're also interested in expanding that out into different service offerings,” said Hanson. Expanding OSIT’s data security options is at the top of Hanson’s list. “Geo-redundancy across different areas, Wasabi buckets, and offering extra protection there for our clients.” Things like NAS backups are also an area which we have a demand for, and that's something that we're looking to move into as well.”