Relion Computer Service

The Situation

A few years ago, managed services provider and Cisco partner Danny Aguilar realized that more and more of his clients were asking about data backup. He considered building a backup system for his clients, but realized that the huge capital investment was not feasible for Relion. So Aguilar began researching and testing several different cloud backup vendors.

"There are a lot of different options for cloud backup out there," Aguilar said. "Reliability, security, and tech support were key issues for us."

Relion considered a brand best known for its consumer product, but decided that although "It was nice and cheap, you may not be able to restore anything—and that's a problem," Aguilar said.

"Big consumer brands can kill everybody in price," Aguilar continued, "but not everybody is going to do their due diligence and see the reviews that say 'it's great for backup, but not so great for restore.'"

Relion then signed up with another cloud backup provider and soon after ran into problems. "As far as the technical support goes, they didn't seem to have a good understanding of how the software worked," Aguilar said. "Which made sense to me later on—I found out that they didn't build it; they bought it from somebody else."

In addition, Relion experienced a lot of errors with that company's software. "It would throw some different errors and we weren't really sure why. And then there were the false positive errors that we just couldn't get rid of," Aguilar described.

Despite the support issues, Relion stayed on with the cloud backup company—until Relion encountered still more significant problems. "I thought we were paying for compressed data, and they said 'Oh no, we're compressing it, and although we didn't make it very clear, we're going to charge you for the native capacity.' Which means that we weren't getting as much as we thought we were."

The Solution

Relion had started shopping around for other cloud backup solutions when another Cisco partner told him about Intronis. "He had just signed up with Intronis and was really happy with it. So I figured Intronis would be worth a look."

Relion ultimately decided on Intronis for a number of reasons. "I like how Intronis is really focused on MSPs. And it's really white labeled, but still offers a lot of support" Aguilar stated. "A lot of other white labels offer hardly any support."

The Result

Aguilar has been pleased with the level of client service in addition to the software improvements. "We're not getting the errors at Intronis that we got with the other cloud backup company we tried," he explained. "And customer support has been helpful when we needed them."

Intronis' clear cost structure has helped Relion plan his own pricing. Because Intronis doesn't charge any licensing or set up fees, partners like Aguilar aren't surprised by hidden costs.

He concluded, "I definitely anticipate that we'll be able to make a nice profit."