The Business Challenge

Custom Cloud Solutions began as a computer repair shop. Repeatedly helping commercial customers recover data in backup fiascos convinced founder and CEO Matthew B. Spain that hosting and managed services were in his future. One of his first challenges was finding a reliable backup and recovery solution for his data center so customers’ data would be available when they needed it.

“As a business owner and a technician, I didn’t have the confidence required to restore hosted data,” he said. “Each backup tool I tried was a train wreck, leaving me no time to grow the business.”

Spain said it took days to back up 100 virtual machines (VMs), and recovering a VM from a backup took hours. He spent more time in the data center than meeting prospective customers.

Spain contacted his friends in the IT industry to see what they used. Their response was the same: Veeam® Backup & Replication™.

“Veeam sounded too good to be true,” he said. “What they told me sounded preposterous. How could they restore a VM from a regular backup in minutes? No way! I had to see what all the hype was about, so I downloaded a free trial of Veeam.”

Thirty minutes later, Spain was backing up the 100 VMs—and backup completed within hours, not days. Next he recovered a VM from a backup—in 90 seconds.

“Thanks to Veeam’s speed and reliability, I reclaimed 20 hours each week to grow the business,” he said. “Those 20 hours became billable hours, totaling $120,000 the first year.”

Next Spain focused on transferring backup copies to a colocation center for redundancy. He set up a virtual private network (VPN) to facilitate the transfer. Everything appeared to be fine, until the electricity bill arrived. The VPN cost $800 per month.

“That was an outrageous cost we couldn’t justify,” Spain said. “It didn’t take us long to realize that Veeam could solve that challenge too.”

The Veeam Solution

Instead of relying on an expensive VPN to get backup copies off site, Custom Cloud Solutions uses a free, encrypted link built into Veeam. It’s called Veeam Cloud Connect, and it lets Veeam customers link to cloud and service providers quickly and easily.

“Our next step was finding a cloud partner that would let us maintain control of our customers and our hosting environment,” Spain said. “The choice was easy and obvious: SingleHop.”

SingleHop’s reseller program is designed for hosting providers like Custom Cloud Solutions. SingleHop offers instant scalability to help them grow their businesses and increase revenue. That’s exactly what happened to Custom Cloud Solutions.

“Revenue is growing 25 percent each year,” Spain said. “Veeam and SingleHop have given us an amazing boost in profitability. And, we have peace of mind knowing our customers’ data is safe and recoverable. Now I have time to manage my company, rather than managing backups.”

Next Custom Cloud Solutions plans to enter the rapidly growing Disaster Recovery-as-a- Service (DRaaS) market by replicating hosted VMs to SingleHop with Veeam Cloud Connect.

“DRaaS helps our partners like Custom Cloud Solutions dramatically increase their margins,” said Jordan Jacobs, Vice President of Products for SingleHop. “Some of the largest independent cloud providers in the world are SingleHop resellers. We offer aggressive recovery time and recovery point objectives so they can make business continuity a reality for their customers.”

SingleHop’s DRaaS offering is powered by Veeam, making SingleHop a Veeam customer too. SingleHop uses Veeam Availability Suite™ to back up, recover and manage thousands of hosted VMs. SingleHop is also a platinum member of the Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) program, which enables Veeam customers to connect with SingleHop for cloud-based backup, recovery and DR.

The Results

• Increases revenue by 25 percent per year
  “Veeam and SingleHop simplify data protection and give us peace of mind so we can focus on growing the business and increasing profitability,” Spain said.
• Frees up time that became billable hours worth $120,000
  “Veeam is fast and reliable, saving 20 hours each week in problem resolution,” Spain said. “We turned those 20 hours into billable hours that totaled $120,000 the first year.”
• Paves the way for entry into the fast-growing DRaaS market
  Demand is high for DRaaS. Custom Cloud Solutions will capitalize on demand by using Veeam Cloud Connect to replicate hosted VMs to SingleHop.