Arcserve MSP Partner Ebstar Delivers Fast, Reliable Data Disaster Recovery With SaaS Backup, Data Protection Software, and Immutable Storage

For over 25 years, Ebstar has offered innovative, tailored IT services for small and mid-sized enterprises across the United Kingdom. As a trusted consultant, Ebstar provides expert advice and guidance to its customers regarding their IT investments as well as managed services, IT and cybersecurity solutions, data backup and disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), firewall-as-a-service, and end-to-end connectivity services, including telephony.

The company strives for technical excellence, investing in training to ensure its advisors and engineers respond more efficiently to customer needs. That focus has resulted in the company developing long-term customer relationships with high retention rates, driving steady organic growth since its founding. And, with the worldwide managed services market project to grow to $26.7 billion by 2028, it also helps the company capture new customers and grow with existing ones.

Cost and Reliability: Key Competitive Advantages for MSPs

Because Ebstar has recognized that cost and reliability are crucial for acquiring and keeping customers, its engineers and advisors must work as efficiently as possible. That’s especially true regarding managing core services such as ransomware protection, backup, and recovery. 

“Customers need to know that we can recover their data in the event of an incident, and we need to know that we can do so quickly,” said Nick Beeby, Owner and IT Consultant at Ebstar. “Besides potentially causing downtime for our customers, a lengthy recovery process consumes lots of resources and pushes up costs. So time is of the essence.”

Rapid recovery capabilities are essential for data stored in the cloud and onsite. “Customers tend to assume that if data is stored in the cloud, it’s safe, but this is not always the case,” added Beeby. “Part of our role is to educate customers so they understand the risks and can make informed data protection decisions for both on-premises and cloud-based systems and storage solutions.”

Ebstar’s legacy backup and recovery solution demanded significant manual intervention. That not only impacted the company’s efficiency and the speed of recovery, it also increased the risk of human error.

Delivering On the Promise of Rapid Recovery

Ebstar eliminated those problems by choosing Arcserve solutions as the foundation for its core offerings. With Arcserve SaaS Backup, ShadowProtect, and OneXafe immutable network-attached storage appliances, Ebstar now makes enterprise-level data protection accessible and affordable for smaller organizations. “We recommend the Arcserve solutions as standard for all our customers,” said Beeby. 

The company rolled out Arcserve SaaS Backup in February 2022, using the solution to protect Microsoft 365 data for about 300 seats across 12 organizations. Ebstar has also employed ShadowProtect since 2015, with the latest version now running hourly offsite server backups for its customers.

Combined Solutions Deliver Powerful Data Protection 

Ebstar pairs ShadowProtect with OneXafe immutable storage to enable a layered approach to data protection, with onsite backups replicated to Ebstar’s private cloud environment. That private cloud is based on a cluster of three OneXafe appliances. 

“With OneXafe, we know that we’re protected against ransomware, which can spread swiftly through the supply chain,” said Beeby. “The data is also encrypted onsite to mitigate the impact of potential data leaks.”

Protection for All Types of Data

With data-agnostic protection, Ebstar backs up all kinds of data for its customers, including Windows and Linux servers, SQL databases, Active Directory databases, and application and file data. Ebstar protects about 70 servers. Ninety percent of those servers are virtualized. 

With self-recovery built into the solution, Ebstar can minimize management time and effort while having confidence that its customers’ data is protected. “If a backup doesn’t complete, the solution will try again so we don’t miss any data,” said Beeby. “Backups are easy to monitor and manage from the centralized ShadowControl monitoring platform.”

ShadowControl is integrated with Ebstar’s service desk using ConnectWise, enabling automated alerts that simplify management. The ability to view anomalies with offsite replication in ImageManager was highly beneficial when Ebstar discovered an out-of-hours ransomware event. Ebstar dealt with the incident quickly and effectively, preventing any data loss for the customer.

Reliable Partnership, Reliable Products

In the eight years Ebstar has been using Arcserve solutions, it has never experienced a failed recovery. The company can recover entire servers in about 15 minutes with Arcserve HeadStart Restore (HSR), which starts recovery while the production server is still running. In the case of a disaster such as a fire or flood, Ebstar can recover customer systems from its private cloud almost immediately to minimize disruption.

It's more common for Ebstar to be called on to assist with an accidental file deletion or corruption event. “Just last week, a financial director called in distress as they had lost a document that had been corrupted,” said Beeby. “Within a few minutes of getting in front of a computer, I was able to recover the file and save them hours of rework.”

The team can onboard customers quickly and easily thanks to Ebstar’s time investment in Arcserve Academytraining, engineer certification, and the solutions’ intuitive designs. “The configuration options are plentiful for our purposes but not overbearing,” added Beeby. “The Arcserve solutions are also highly scalable as we can self-provision licenses as and when we need additional capacity.”

Day-to-day management and reporting on backup and recovery are also efficient with the Arcserve ShadowControl dashboard. That frees up staff for other activities. Many of Ebstar’s customers must comply with industry and government regulations around data protection, such as the GDPR, and these reports provide evidence of a successful backup strategy to simplify legal compliance with regulatory and audit requirements.

“With Arcserve, our customers can avoid costly data loss so they can stay productive and compliant, while rapid and reliable recovery helps us operate efficiently, build customer trust, and keep our promises,”concluded Beeby.

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