Review and demo of Syscloud Microsoft 365 Backup Solution

so I don't I know I AB know nothing about your company I went on to the website sis clouds.com and I see that you do backups I see you've been with the company like 10 plus years is that right yeah no but shoting pushing 11 so as of November I'll be here 11 years which is crazy so I joined when we were a very early stage startup back in 2013 towards the end of 2013 and yeah our Focus initially was around Google workspace backup and then Microsoft Office 365 so we really focus primarily on the productivity tools and those have been really our Core Business for many years now we have close to 1500 customers really across the world a lot of them are in North America US and Canada and then we've started to introduce other major applications that customers are utilizing so we we've seen with SAS adoption a lot of customers are using 20 to 30 SAS tools to run their business so we've incorporate right now we offer seven uh in addition to Google and Microsoft we support QuickBooks uh Salesforce slack uh hubot and um we're in the process of of launching Shopify and zero um in the next couple of weeks so this is back in all the data Within These s apps yeah so so what I would say is all all the the core data right so when you think back on the uh the productivity tools like Google and Microsoft you're thinking like your emails your documents your calendars your contacts so core tools or or applications that you're using on a day-to-day basis in terms of storing important information all right cool you're familiar with the majority of our audience are manage service providers so they're primarily their primary their their main tool meof 365 which I'm sure a number of them offer back up all I have was wondering with the backups these services that like yourself where you're backing up like a Microsoft 365 tenant what's the recovery like for something like that say for example the the whole thing gets down you get locked say you get locked out of your tenant I don't know if this is like a scenario that's s popped up and but like how would you take the backup that you've done and then like restore that into a fresh tenant or get the data how does that happen yeah that's a great question a lot of the times what we see is customers having more one-off scenarios where hey we lost this file or this particular folder or or this person left the organization and maybe upon leaving they decided to delete a bunch of information and we need to get that data back to okay may their whoever their boss was or whoever's taking on that role in the future a lot of the times our product is very granular and it makes it very easy for an administrator or even an end user because we do offer a self-service access to go in and be able to recover the data scenario that you're talking about where you know our entire account the entire tenant gets wiped out a lot of the times we will provide support and one that's one of the things we really pride ourselves on is customer success and the support that we provide to our customers we actually had this happen about a month ago we had a customer of ours they had about I think five to six thousand users and they wrote a script in their they were actually a Google customer their Google admin console they lost all of their email for every single user so we actually help them do a bulk restore from the back end because it would be a little bit tedious to go through the application and and one off restore every single user so we helped them do that um from the back end and I think within a couple of weeks um all of the data was recovered and restored back our product does ReStore in parallel so I always tell customers this hey if you're restoring 100,000 items for one user and then you need to restore 10 for the next User it's not like you have to wait for the 100,000 to finish for that one user before the next one start stores in parallel I see yeah that's quite cool yeah because I'm aware that there was that I was that pension provider that running Google workspace and something happened to their um their tenant but luckily they had a backup tenant yeah qu 5,000 mailboxes PR crazy so it's one of the main concerns I like one of the things in my head so we had like recently time of recording this August 2024 we had the instent with Crow strike and then shortly after which was like earlier this week we had a complete Zer outage due to denial of service attack one of the things I'm thinking from a business continuity perspective if a large service like this goes down in the future say for example zour can is the data that you're backing up can that be can that can that be interrogated on another platform is do you guys look have a tool or anything like that so that I can go into the data that has been backed up from SharePoint online but I've only got like the backup file and I can't get it back into SharePoint online how would that work yeah great question so what we actually do is we focus on providing a second copy of the data in an alternative Cloud environment right for example if the customer is on Office 365 their data is in the Azure Cloud we encrypt them back up the data in AWS in Amazon's Cloud okay um so the benefit there is even if Azure or Microsoft had a major outage right the customer would still have access to their data through our product through ccloud in in in AWS now again they would have to export the data locally because like you said if they couldn't restore it back to SharePoint or one drive they would still have an option to download it locally to their local machine in the event that there was a catastrophic incident like that so there's still ways for them to access the data there still like some sort of usable format they could get to if the worst were ever to happen okay yeah so and then that's our philosophy not having all of your eggs in one basket right because if if you're on Office 365 and you're on Azure and you're going to run a backup also an Azure right you got everything tied there that doesn't make any sense does it yeah okay is it is it just like those two platforms where you back up to or do you have any of your own third party um service how does that work so right now we exclusively back up with AWS we do have multi- region support if customers want their data in the United States or if they want it in Canada or the UK or even Australia we have AWS region support glob and we are of supporting gcp and Azure meaning if a Microsoft customer wanted their data on gcp or a Google customer wanted their data just to give customers other options that is something that we do we are working on right now all right next question this comes down from I would say experience but I've seen it happen um few times though where you've got a m service provider they're providing their client with uh Backup Service they're they're managing the whole backup solution for that customer MSP they're running um potentially your piece of software or another Backup Service doesn't even have to be in the cloud we could just be talking about local backups not only the endpoints or like local file servers or whatever what I've seen in the past is the client's getting charged on a regular BAS is like every month for this backup service and the Backup Tool is reporting that the backup is completed successfully but then something bad happens say for example someone accidentally deletes the file deletes a petition on a hard drive or accidentally just deletes everything the server completely fails MSP goes to the backup attempts to do a restore and it can't be restored is there so I've always said that okay if you're offering Backup Service are you actually testing your backup service that you can restore so is there any process or any feature within your Suite your tool set where there's the attach restore that can be carried out um for I might be just this is just going in personal experience I don't know if it's part of a complete process now but um it's one question that's popped up in the PS is okay are you actually testing your backups that they can be restored yeah now great question we have a uh pretty significant testing team here at ccloud and and as we know Microsoft Google these other Cloud providers they make changes to the apis on a fairly consistent basis so for us we need to be we need to be up to date to to ensure that our product help customers doing a one drive restore and they're restoring complex several folders and their sharing permissions we need to ensure the Fidelity of that that's perfect we do a lot of internal testing which happens okay every day and then we also do encourage customers to to do monthly if not quarterly tests it it's very easy to just take data we offer an option in our product which is called a cross user restore so they could basically create a dummy account or just any active account that is not a real user and they could take data from a real user and restore it to that other user right just to see how it performs like okay we we got all of the data back we got the structure of the permissions we got it back exactly how we want it we definitely do encourage customers to to do those thing okay cool and you mentioned there that you your recovery process is it's in parallel so it's not just one mailbox at a time they kind of all come back together what and that's is that was the I know that AWS is different storage facilities like you've got Glacier storage and S3 storage where exactly within that stack is the DAT had been held like what the time what is the time for recovery no great question so the way that we uh work is we actually any data that is what we consider recent data within the past two years we have the ability to restore like instantly basically the process begins anything that's older than two years I believe it can take up to 12 to 24 hours there's a little bit of a process to get it going and that's because like you said different like tiers of of storage I don't know exactly in AWS which what each of them is called so I think there's like Glacier in retrieval regular GLA insurance so there's some different options I know we're also in the process of offering some different capabilities customers who come to us and say hey we want to be able to restore every we don't care how old the data is but like we want it immediate versus maybe a nonprofit or an education customer who's okay with hey it will be more economical or the pricing will be a little bit better with stuff that's B within two years yeah maybe we have to wait another 12 to 24 hours to get all of it back so yeah we definitely uh there are different tiers of of storage classification you mentioned in terms of how quickly he can recover data but even Beyond those things it also depends on the throttling with the API in the cloud provider if somebody's going to restore a million documents right even if it took an extra 12 to 24 hours to start it doesn't mean that's going to be done in one or two days right it might take five days right it might take six days so even if you had instant retrieval instead of six six days maybe takes five right so it's not try to explain to people it's not going to be there's other factor that that we depend on yeah I've seen that before where even we got one large video file that's going to transfer across much quicker than multiple small files at the same size okay all right my last question in regards to restore is actually it's more to do with retention you mentioned there two years or more than two years is there your standard or package is there a default retention in there is that something that have to pay more for higher retention or longer retention Bill great question so are default retentions actually unlimited from the time that the customer installs the product we actually retain all of the data indefinitely now uh they can configure retention based on their preference there would be two options one would be configuring the retention at the service level meaning for one drive we only want to keep files created or modified within the last year or two years and then what I think is more common is user level retention so when a user Parts the organization and they're considered suspended deleted or essentially inactive there's only so many days months a year if we want to retain that user's data so we have those types of options again our defaults unlimited so even if the customer deleted the user account from Office 365 admin console we would still keep that deleted user and their back and their backup in ccloud inde definitely but they could go and set a attention to Auto remove that user over time okay correct right cool I think I'll leave it there I I don't want to get too technical my head was going somewhere else there so you want to um maybe just give us a a little demo of the uh your interface your platform shows around yeah absolutely let me go ahead and share my screen you can see it here okay so what I wanted to First do was log in into our MSP portal as I know you mostly uh work within the MSP community so that they could see the the platform here and um give me one second I just realized that um I have to plug in my uh charger comp's about to die excent that's well hopefully you can stick around yeah I just wanted to do that real quick before we run an issue here when we get cut off sorry about that it's okay I'll cut this out I'll edit this out okay perfect I appreciate so you've got a dedicated um sort of section for man service providers that sort of their own you've got this is a feature that you've got so I'm going to guess this so that you can create sort of custom customers yeah you've got the button there add customer yes so exactly so what the MSP would be able to do is click on this ad customer button and they could they up here XYZ company and um when they go in and add the organization what that's going to do is generate an onboarding link right so if they have the administrator P privileges for their customer they can go and perform that onboarding for the customer or they can send them the instructions as to how they can onboard okay and then that that MSP can manage all of their customers within this portal here um so you can see a couple of examples of accounts that we have in our test MSP portal so we can see the customer name the date they were onboarded what the actual account name is this would be the the super admin account that they use to do the install what clouds are connected so you can see here like at this one we have Google this one we've got Google Microsoft HubSpot QuickBooks Force whole list of apps here and and then you'll also be able to see licensing how many licenses are being used versus paid for how much storage is being used so what you'll be able to do then is also if you selected a particular customer you could actually do a couple of things you can look at their licensing here so if you wanted to add additional licenses you would have that option so you could add them by the cloud application and then you also could go and actually view the customer dashboard so you could look at the health of the backups and and see how everything's running you could even take it a step further by viewing the customer archives um by viewing the archives I'll show you here if I if I click on the dashboard view we can just go in and and access it's really a readon view um and if the MSP was going to have a greater level of access and actually go in and administer the entire application then they can click on The View archives button uh with this would just give them kind of an overview as to the health of the backup um how many days the data has been protected the number of admins the backup health status in terms of you know how it's progressed dayto day so we can see how many backups have been completed and which ones are still in progress any recent restores or exports that have been initiated completed you can see backup Trend graphs to see how the backup has grown over time and then there's some other details on abin rolls and a logs and I'll show you in more detail what this looks like but basically they would have two options they can access just the dashboard or they can take it a step further and go and actually view the customer archives by doing that they're going to have to authenticate in either by okay using a Google authentication or a username password option which I've already done to save us some time here so it's almost like a separate login for the actual client account yeah exactly so actually let go back yeah well again G as I got logged out yeah so this would bring them into their actual as you mention the actual customer account and then from there they have some different options we looked at the dashboard but they could go into the the archives page so they can manage all of the backups from here actually you know what let me go in I think I went into the want to go into a different one here give me a second me go let see if I can go to this real demo one think it was logging me into this other one oops oops back dashboard here again customer AR yes I want to log in again I think it's cash in me let's this works yeah so sorry Scot I just want to try logging into a different account I think something got okay A little no problem oh give me a second just going to sorry about that more second thanks for your patience here it's okay it's Friday yeah because I think it was cashing the other account that I had so this was a better one to show the demo on now I should m all right so now yeah now I've got it sorry about that okay so once we're in the customer account we can go ahead and then we can toggle to look at the different applications so again the dashboard view we can come in we can see which applications this customer has backed up as you can see Google HubSpot Office 365 QuickBook Salesforce slack really where the MSP would spend a majority of their time once the backup has been configured it's in the archives page from the archives page and I I'll just show the the Google workspace example or I'll show The Office 365 since a lot of msps focus on Office 365 space so once they go in here they'll be able to see the different domains this customer had one two five domains however many domains the customer had they can see all the domains the user is backed up on that domain and how much data is being protected as well um and then once going in here they'll be able to actually see the list of users and as we were talking about um okay even users that have been deleted on The Office 365 so we're still retaining their backup so this is presenting the status based uh off of the Microsoft admin console so we can see the user um all the applications the storage we also do stand this alert risk we scan for ransomware and other types of potential uh compliance threats so I can talk a little bit about that in a few minutes and then we show the backup completed status the way that our product works the backup runs once every 24 hours on an automated schedule so it runs once a day and then it's set to automatically run the next day that just happens every day for that customer okay then you can drill in so if you wanted to go into a particular user's archive you can click on that user and then you could go and and decide okay I need to restore the entire one drive or export it you can do that right from here a lot of times customers will want to go in and and get a little bit more granular and they'll want to actually restore certain components of the one dve so you can come in here and restore certain files or certain folders so I want see okay yes this is down to the file level so not just going to give you some okay okay can you do the same for the mails can you like go in view the mailbox within here yeah exactly so you can do the same thing so and I was going to mention here you could restore to the same user or cross user so you could type in a different user and restore over to another user within the organization okay create a new folder so it makes it very easy and clean when getting the back so we give the new folder option because we don't want you to overwrite existing data say that that file still existed in Google Drive you may not want to overwrite the existing you may want to create a new copy in a new folder so that's what I can see how I can see how that' be quite useful you get an employee that's leaving and then you've got someone else coming in to fill that position you can literally just go into here and restore their one their old employees one drive is a folder into the new employees One Drive okay that can see how that be quite useful yeah then you could also go to a previous point in time so users made changes or deleted data or you got hit with ransomware and you want to say all right I want to recover the data how it existed on July 18 you can go back to a previous snapshot so it's taking an actual snapshot it's not just that that's that file and how it's changed over time are those files okay that was one because that was one of the things I was thinking of asking you in regards to if you unlimited retention you got I can literally go back all the way in the calendar so when we first start backing up and take yeah that's right yeah so that that first day that you start would be your initial historical base backup and then every day is the incremental snap shocks point forward that's right okay and this your tool does it just look for you users that pop up in the Microsoft tenant and add them in automatically into here that does as part of the backup job if you configure the backup domain wide we will automatically add anyone new that's been added to the tenant into the tool it's an automated process excellent and then you'll also as you were asking about if you want to toggle over to email right like to go over to the user Outlook from here as well or I have the other applications yeah okay restore same user cross user you can restore to a new folder we do offer a preview in the email as well this can be turn on on or off based on customer preference so there's different havein settings which I'll show you quickly but you have that option the other thing that I wanted to mention when looking at Office 365 we actually back up SharePoint and teams at the Domain level because they're not tied to an individual user like a user's mailbox or their one drive so when you're going to access SharePoint or teams you would come down here and you can see all of the SharePoint sites across the organization so they can all be searched for here but then again you can restore the entire SharePoint site or you could drill in and restore specific components of that site you'd have those options um additionally there's reports so when you go to initiate a restore you're going to see the progress of that restore you can see this is a test account where where we do some testing but normally when you're going to do a restore like the one we did here 14 items on May 31st that took three minutes so it's usually going to be a a pretty quick process but again you'll see the source account that you're restoring from the destination account that it's being restored to number of the service that you're restoring from number of items the administrator who initiated the restore the day that started the day to completed you have all that got whole a log there okay know the export report is well oops I hoed into H spot show on The Office 365 side you have an export report also uh and you'll be provided a download like I think it's available for 15 days and then it expires and you'd have to reinitiate it and then we also have as you were alluding to an access management page as well as an audit logs the access management is really where you're configuring the level of access if you want to Grant other administrators access to ccloud maybe somebody who's not even an Office 365 from your admin Azure console maybe they don't have access there but you want to give them access to the backups so you have that granularity to go in here and do that you also have self-service access there yes so the administrator access would look like this if I went in I can see all of the users who currently have access and I can add or remove any of these users I can also customize the access if I clicked on Bruce here I wanted to say okay Bruce is only going to be responsible for our Office 365 backups and maybe I don't want Bruce creating or or modifying backup jobs or emailing or previewing user email content but he can go ahead and do all of these other things here you can really customize the level of access for these He also mentioned the compliance like you know sensitive data like you had warnings there on the max some of the mailboxes yeah so let me just confirm we have so what we have is a tool called backup Data Insights this is what I think really separates us in the industry uh from number of the other players is that we really focus on Beyond just the basic backup and restore how can we give you a greater level of insight into potential threats of ransomware potential threats of sensitive data exposure like PCI or Hippa right so what this allows the customer to do is go in and actually see the incidents and then there are some options that they can take so for example if this file was infected with ransomware I could actually go and delete it directly from my Office 365 by one drive I could also delete it directly from ccloud maybe that most recent backup I don't want that anymore because we deem that it's been infected with ransomware but I want to go restore from a safe snapshot so you have those options within the tool all right yeah this is like one of the main differentiators then between yourself and like your competitors Alternatives yeah AB absolutely certainly here in the like the UK where I am we came out with the Euro and stuff like that LE recently so there's there's there's been a move with uh companies that are they're taking their data out of like the European data centers that maybe in Germany and places like that and moving them to the UK is there an option with CIS Cloud where exactly in your AWS service that the client state has actually backed up to yeah so when the customer goes and performs the initial install and uh goes goes into the process of creating what we call this this backup job before doing that they will be they will go through an onboarding guide and one of the questions will ask them like where do you want the data uh housed right as I mentioned we we have I think we have four or five options definitely US Canada uh UK and Australia are uh the options that we provide but based on preference we can also we bought another region if a customer wanted the data in in another region that we didn't support at the moment that's also B all right that's good to know I'm looking at your bottom right there you're on it's how a day yeah know I'm to CL maybe we' got an MSP that can help you there right yeah solution to CIS Club than what you're running at the moment there's a lot people MP you speak to any it guys like why do you have this on your machine I know I need to I'm probably in the that looks like the one that came with the the laptop it's got D logo on it as well yeah exactly cool okay let's we'll tie up here then last thing it's always the question that people want to know first how much does it cost what's your like commercial structure is it on file size is it on tenant how how does it work on of are we going to get charged for our restore how does that all work yeah no great questions we do offer a 30% discount to manag service providers when they go ahead and purchase the product it is a licensing fee of per user per month so each account that's licensed is essentially provided unlimited storage so they don't have to worry about look okay want they license the user they don't have to worry about the storage sometimes with larger Enterprise customers where they have terabytes of data there may it may make sense to explore storage based options but I think when working with msps the user-based licensing makes the most sense for each license that you pay for the storage is unlimited and you don't have to worry about it going it be easier for them also to resell it to their customers isn't it and they can pay month-to Monon quarter yearly whatever their preference is we're flexible there cool okay and I'm I'm going to assume that's on a sliding scale if it's five five users then it's certain price and if it's 500 users you're going to get a better deal yeah exactly our retail pricing starts around $3 a user a month but again based on tier pricing based on adding like you said once you get up to a couple hundred users thousand users then then that pricing could get back see for example as an MSP right now that did any sort of Microsoft 365 backups and they like to look at this they go and click on the link below this video whatever that might be once they publish ship and they go sell it to one of their customers they sell a service to one of their customers and they're they get the commercials from you they know how much they're paying then maybe one of their other customers they on board maybe five or six of them is it the same commercials that they're paying or do you look at as an the account manager are you are you looking every quarter or is it like an annual thing where we're going to review the cost per user yeah great question I I think what we would really try to do is is do it monthly even as as soon as monly right if it's an MSP that we're having a lot of success with and they're onboarding a number of new customers and and a number of licenses per customer yeah we can definitely work with them on the pricing and also as I mentioned yeah earlier on the call we also do provide a dedicated customer success team so we want the MSP to feel like Hey we're not just giving you this product and saying good luck you're going to have a team from CIS Club that's going to be there to help you along the way right if it's technical support if you just need help with onboarding or or training within the application all of those things will be provided unlimited at no additional cost just you provide any sort of marketing or sales support for them yeah so we we do have some one pagers that they can pass out to their customers and I know that is something we're continuing to uh to add to cool um I had another question there but I think it's left my head now it's because it's Friday worries I think that's it right I think I've done for the week um but it was really great um to get an eye on your product um it's certainly something that I don't have any experience with um because this is when I was in the MSP thing it was like the pre- cloud um but it's like an essential though isn't it yeah absolutely I think yeah like you said I think cloud the cloud backup is pretty mainstream when I joined you 10 years ago I think a lot of people like why do I need to do this doesn't yeah Google doesn't Microsoft do this now I think people have realized that having a backup was critical and the more of these large outages we continue to have the more that I'm thinking hm actually that's one one my final question now this I think is probably going to be a no you're dedicated to AWS for your storage I couldn't use your SAS application to back up to the local in my office at the moment that's correct yeah we are uh strictly a cloud backup solution uh everything we do is cloud so we don't do anything anything local yeah great question right cool all right I think we'll leave it there then Ryan thanks for your time today yeah thanks so much SC was real pleasure really appreciate the opportunity have a great weekend