ERP037 - Cloudberry Backup w/ Doug Hazelman

Welcome to Evolve Radio where we explore the evolution of business and technology. Today's podcast is brought to you by Cloudberry, your number one cross-platform cloud backup platform. I'm chatting with Doug Hazelman, VP of Technical Marketing with Cloudberry. Backups are an important offering for any IT service provider. And Cloudberry is focused on supporting MSPs to build a flexible backup offering that protects servers, workstations, as well as cloud app data like Office 365 and G Suite. Cloudberry offers a free trial that even includes cloud storage space to test out the system. So go to cloudberrylab.com to start your trial now. Now welcome Doug. On the podcast today, I have Doug Hazelman, VP of Technical Marketing with Cloudberry. Welcome Doug. Thanks Todd, glad to be here. So we're going to be talking about backup, an extremely important topic for any IT service provider. As far as the things that you absolutely should be doing, virus protection and backup rank pretty much one and two, the things that that should be important as. IT service provider, so this is an important topic. You're with Cloudberry and it's a cloud backup software born in the cloud type of approach. If you want, give us a rundown on what excites you about Cloudberry as a product offering for MSPs and IT service providers. Sure, so, you know, I've been in the backup biz for a while, but, you know, one of the things I love about Cloudberry is first, they're focused on the IT service provider, managed service provider market. So, you know, our managed backup service is is targeted towards that. And then I think what really sets us apart and is a unique differentiator is the fact that we don't provide the cloud storage. The managed service provider provides the cloud storage and we support over 30 different cloud storage providers. So you can go all in on AWS S3 if you want to, or maybe Azure, or you can even mix and match. And what that allows you to do is create offerings for your customers. Maybe they want the the platinum level and and they have a certain budget versus someone who just needs some basic stuff and and doesn't have a lot of money. Maybe you choose a different cloud storage provider that's that's a little easier on on their budget. So it it really gives a lot of choice to the managed service providers and it prevents any kind of cloud lock-in. Because even though you might choose AWS at the beginning, you can always move that to Azure or Google or Wasabi or backblaze, you know, down down the road. So you're you're not locked into any any one particular platform. Right, so the front end is yours to manage and even brand as well. And then the back end, it's kind of irrelevant. As long as the data is safe and backed up. It allows you a bit more flexibility to to work with your own stack without that really affecting the the day-to-day operations of the backup for the for the client, right? Yes, exactly. And the system does image-based backup as well as file-based backup. Is there a distinction in the product or is that a just a part of the configuration? Um, it's it's really just a part of the configuration. So whether you want to do image or file, um, is is kind of up to you and and what your customer's needs are. Um, you know, the nice thing about image is it gives you quick recovery of of the complete, you know, server or workstation. But, you know, a lot of times if you're on limited bandwidth, file level backup, you know, you're you're protecting the data, that might be just good enough for for what that customer needs. Um, because sometimes image level, you know, can take a while to upload to the cloud versus file level, which is usually pretty quick. Right. And do you find people who have a different strategy for the server infrastructure versus managing maybe backup for an endpoint? And can you mix and match that as well? Oh, definitely. So, you know, what we see a lot is especially for critical servers is is the image level backup just because recovery can be so much quicker. And then for desktops, a lot of times it's just kind of file level backup or, you know, backup the profile directory, those types of things where the where the data is. And then the other thing from a recovery perspective is, you know, we talk a lot about the cloud and backup to the cloud. But you can also backup locally. So, you know, when I talk about that image level backup and quick recovery, maybe you do image level backup locally, but then file level backup to the cloud. So it's completely configurable in terms of however you want to do that. Again, based on needs, budget, bandwidth, all those types of things. Right. And the I see a trend in the industry with kind of the alignment of some of the other vendors around a single stack. You guys are off obviously feature-based in the fact that you are kind of roll your own and and design your own backup strategy as is. Uh you're either Cloudberry sense of this or your own personal situation or feeling on having an appliance or not having an appliance. Given your history at Veeam, I think there there might be uh maybe some uh some influence in that. But I'd love your thoughts on appliance or no appliance and what does that matter? So it goes back to what I said about vendor lock-in. You know, as soon as you have an appliance, you're locked into that vendor and to that appliance. And if you want to change, then how do you get that data that's on that appliance or in that proprietary cloud out and into the new system that you want to use? Especially if you've got regulations where you need to keep backups and those types of things, it kind of goes back to that whole vendor lock-in. So those are those are kind of things you want to be kind of concerned about. The other is and and not all companies are this way, but a lot of times is the upfront cost with the appliance because you're you're getting hardware. Now, some offer rental models and those types of things, but in an office of 10 people, do you really need a $20,000 appliance sitting in their office to kind of handle the backup needs? Or is it fine just to have the backup locally installed on on the PCs and and on the servers and and sending it to the cloud and to a NAS that you have local that you only spent, you know, a couple hundred bucks for. Right. So I guess to extend on that, if you don't have a local appliance to backup to, it can slow the recovery. What are the options for folks if they're going to use Cloudberry for that being able to do a quick recovery from a local image rather than have to stream that image from the internet, which could obviously take a few hours. Yeah, well so there's actually a couple different scenarios there. So if you're storing your image backups locally, then if you're virtualized, you can take that image and spin it up as a VM. We store it as a virtual machine and you're, you know, you're your backup and running that way. If you have hardware like that's a desktop or, you know, laptop, you can do bare metal recovery onto new hardware. You know, and again, you're you're doing it locally so you don't have to like copy it all down from the internet. And when we talk about cloud, specifically if you're looking at Amazon or Azure, we also have the option of recovering that image as a cloud-based virtual machine. So you can recover it, you're saving it to S3, you can recover it as EC2 virtual machine in Amazon or as an Azure VM in in Azure. So and we're we're looking to add additional platforms to that. But that way, in the event of a disaster where, you know, maybe the entire office is is no longer there. But, you know, you still need to to have, you know, people access the servers and and those types of things. You can spin it up in the cloud and have people access it in the cloud versus having to have anything locally in order to recover it too. And is that something that's built into the software that you can ask for that image to be pushed up into the EC2 image and run from your platform? Or do you have to do that separate from Cloudberry? Uh no, so from a Cloudberry perspective, if you're sending your image level backup to either Amazon S3 or Azure. Then you get the option to recover it that image as a VM in either of those platforms. That's nothing there's nothing else special that you need to do. Cool. All right. And the other half that I found interesting about the platform as well is you guys also offer cloud application backup, so Office 365 and G Suite. And this is something that is becoming a lot more important. A lot a lot of people don't think that this is something that they would require back in the day. They're like, well, it runs in the cloud. It's it's it's managed. Someone else pays to look after this. It can be a a pretty awful mistake once people realize that it is not an inherent protection for those cloud-based systems. So maybe just tell us a bit more about the cloud backup functions of Cloudberry. Sure. You know, I always like to say it's your data, you need to protect it. Just because you're running Office 365 or G Suite, they may have a backup of your email, but it may only be for the last two weeks. You know, they don't have any kind of retention unless you want to pay extra for it. The fact is, it's still your data or or your customer's data that they need to be able to access if if they need to. So I always recommend even if you are running your in the cloud, backup your data. And, you know, with our our Office 365 and and G Suite protection, one of the cool things I think is you can backup cloud to cloud. So if you're, you know, Office 365, you can backup to Amazon S3. If you're G Suite, you can backup to Azure or or Amazon or any other cloud. So that way, you know, the data is protected on a different platform. You need to recover, you can still do that. So you guys really play the glue in the middle to shuffle stuff around in whatever cloud you choose and whatever clouds you need, right? Correct. We we live in a multi-cloud world, so. Yeah. And that's truly the case now. I mean, you often see people discussing it in in forums and things like that asking, you know, are you guys on Azure or you on Amazon? And people seem to be sort of some things here, some things over there. So being able to to be portable between those environments as you figure out your footing would be important for sure. Yeah, definitely. And from a a branding perspective, really nice addition that you guys have is that you can white label this. So that it doesn't look like the vendor is using a particular piece of software in the background. Not that that matters. Uh maybe, but you know, some people really like having that brand identity and that this is our ABC IT services backup software. So that's a a nice play. Have you found people really gravitate towards that? Definitely. And and the one area, you know, and and where I see it's it's really valuable to have that capability is if a program prompt pops up and it says Cloudberry. What's the customer going to do? Are they going to call their IT service provider or are they going to contact Cloudberry? You want them to see your name if you're managing their IT and that's what this allows. So, you know, something pops up, it says ABC IT. Okay, I know to call my ABC IT guy, you know, whatever. It makes it look like, yes, this is an offering that we have. It's our brand. The customers typically don't necessarily care about the the back-end technology. They just want to know that they're protected and it's it's the best way to do that. That's a good point. The other one I thought of as you were you were talking about that would be hopefully they're becoming security aware. And if they see some prompt from a piece of software they don't recognize, maybe they would question that. Hopefully. Exactly so in some circumstances. But yeah, if if it is ABC IT backup, then they're more comfortable with that piece of software running if they're somewhat security sensitive, right? Exactly. Yeah. What about the traditional competition that backup faces in maybe the client where you've got a weekend warrior IT guy. And he uh you you propose some backup pricing for them and he does some quick Google research and says, wow, this is really expensive compared to la la la, whatever backup service. This is something that I've seen historically in the past where people don't really understand the distinction between backup services and why they're they're different. So most people would probably not say that Cloudberry is too expensive. If you actually look at the pricing. So, you know, so that that's kind of one aspect that that we do have going for us. But, you know, people are going to shop around and they're going to look at pricing. A lot of people are very price conscious and price sensitive. And again, because we're not offering the cloud, we don't have a data center where we're storing your data. It allows us to offer very competitive pricing for the software component and then you can go out and shop around for the cloud storage and and for the cloud services. So that takes kind of the pricing pressure out of it in terms of of, you know, Cloudberry. But what you do see is they will shop around and and you'll, you know, like you said, you you brought up appliances and someone's, oh, well, they give me a free appliance and then it's only so much per month. That may be the case, but then, you know, what's your maintenance, what's your refresh cycle on on the hardware and those types of things. So things that people don't necessarily always think about if they just look at price, there's there's a lot more to it than just price. Yeah, and I think the the options of how you're backing up things are important. What one of the distinctions that I found people didn't really understand in that those scenarios where they would they would do some research and and try to to compete with some off-the-shelf software. Is most of those systems are file-based and that's okay if you just need to recover the files. But if you lose an entire server or a workstation, there's still the effort of recovering that machine versus just being able to restore from an image. So I think it's important that people educate their customers on why the backups are different and where that situation may apply. And again, advantage for you guys that you you can kind of mix and match in whatever those scenarios are for sure. The other spots are you you do have some PSA integration, so you guys plug into Connectwise and Autotask. Can you expand a bit on on what the features are that that are allowed for by having that PSA integration directly? Well, one of the nice things is from a ticketing perspective, you know, if it's if it's with your PSA, then it can obviously we can tie into the ticketing system and and and bring those up. The other is, you know, from a billing perspective, we can bring in that usage info from from what they're using on Cloudberry. Pull that into their PSA if they're if they're using it for billing. And we even bring in the the amount of cloud storage they're using, so you can set the price on cloud storage that you charge the customer. Okay, they're using so this is how many gigabytes or terabytes that they're using in cloud storage, so this is going to be their price this month and and those types of things. So really streamlines that process. And then besides PSA, we also have RMM integration with Connectwise automate. And we have a couple of others that we have integration that aren't necessarily on our website, but they're integrated from the perspective of that RMM vendor. So like Ninja is an example where it's a really deep integration with Ninja. But if you purchase from Ninja, add Cloudberry to it, then you get that deep integration. Right. And you guys have really easy deployment because you're just software and you can kind of just pop that onto whatever managed assets the the vendor would need, right? Yes. Okay. And what about road map? What are some features that Cloudberry have in the archives you guys are looking to to spin out? We're always working on on something and a couple of things we're we're looking at expanding some of the support we have for our cloud storage vendors to offer things that, you know, currently we might only offer on Amazon or Azure. So like synthetic backup is is one of those items where rather than having to do a weekly full backup, you can just keep doing an incremental and then have the the synthetic backup build up in the cloud. So that's something we offer for Amazon and Azure, we're rolling it out some other platforms as well. Also, the recovery verification, um looking at doing that automated so that once a backup is complete. Let's run through a restore scenario and verify that yes, this is a good backup, you'll be able to restore from it if you need to. So that's another thing that that's that's coming down the road on the manage backup side. Very cool. And what about the vendors that you guys deal with, the cloud vendors? Have you developed relationships with them or do you sort of weigh into that at all? Like or you leave that more agnostic for the providers? No, we have relationships with with all the vendors, for most of the vendors that we do support. So, we have a great relationship with Amazon, great relationship with with Microsoft and Azure. There was a a webinar today with with Wasabi, a joint webinar that we're doing with them. We've done joint stuff with Backblaze. We we've done a lot of work with Ninja. So we do have a very healthy partnership ecosystem and, you know, managing those partnerships, uh moving forward. Excellent. And if people are using some form of backup or they're looking for alternatives, what are your suggestions for them in learning more about Cloudberry? Well, first off is we offer free trials. So if you want to get in, look, take a look at our manage backup service, go to cloudberrylab.com, you know, go to manage backup, and sign up for a free trial. And once you get access to the free trial, we verify that you are a managed service provider first before we give you access. But once you have access to it, we actually throw in some free storage for your testing. So just a a couple of gigs of of Amazon S3 storage, so you get that for free. So you can test it. But then also that unlocks access to the pricing information. So we don't put our for our manage backup service, this targeted MSPs, we don't publish, we don't publicly put that that pricing on the internet. Just because we don't want our MSP customers to see the pricing. Um, you know, they're like, oh, you're only paying this much for that for the backup. Why are you charging me more? But once you are signed up for the trial, you can click the buy button and it brings up the menu of pricing. Um, you can put in numbers, you can we have very aggressive volume discounts. So, you know, that first number you see is that's just a list price, but, you know, you you up the quantity to 30, 50, 100 and you'll see the discount kick in and the price drop really significantly. So that's one of the best ways to to get started and take a look at is just do a trial. And you guys outside of the MSP market, you do offer enterprise backup as well. So if someone is inhouse IT and they would like to look at this and want to experiment with some some back-end vendors like S3 and Azure and things like that. There's options for those direct to enterprise as well, right? Yeah, we again, our manage backup, we target for manage service providers, but if there is inhouse IT, they can't take a look at that as well. We do have some customers that are managed service provider using our manage backup service. But if you're at home and just a home user and a prosumer and you like this idea of being able to backup to the cloud, but you don't need this whole management interface. We have what I call our standalone backup, which is Cloudberry backup. And you can download and install that. The pricing on that is published. There's a free version and that can help you get started. You just at home, you've got a couple of computers that you want to backup to the cloud. Cloudberry backup is is the way to go. All right, Doug, we'll appreciate your time here and informing us on Cloudberry. If people would like to find out more about the product or Cloudberry itself, any social channels or other mediums they should look for you and follow you on? Yeah, so for Cloudberry, it's Cloudberry Lab, which is on Twitter and and other areas. So, and then Cloudberrylab.com is the website. Uh me personally, I am at VM Doug across most of the socials. So you'll find me there on Twitter, Instagram and other areas including Reddit. And then finally, one other thing that we do have is as a kind of a resource for the community is we do a podcast, I do a podcast called MSP Voice. And the goal of MSP Voice is not to be a podcast about Cloudberry, but it's a meant to be a podcast for MSPs, hearing from other MSPs. So each week I interview a different managed service provider or someone in the industry. And we don't talk about Cloudberry. We talk about what's going on in the industry or how they grew their business and any tips and tricks they may have for other MSPs. Yeah, it's a good one. I've listened to MSP Voice. It's a it's a fun podcast, so definitely check that out. All right. Well, we'll wrap up there and thanks for your time, Doug. All right, thank you, Todd.