Tecbound Assures Azure Continuity With Datto

An important change is underway for MSPs. “It used to be that our customers didn’t understand exactly what the cloud is,” says Oscar Diaz, CEO of the Calgary-based MSP Tecbound. “Now, however, companies are actively looking to move to the cloud — and they’re looking for help to do it securely.”

Tecbound serves a demanding client base, with its primary focus on cybersecurity for Canadian police agencies, public safety and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). “We are one of the few IT companies in Canada that specializes in helping police agencies comply with NPSNet Connection Authorization Change/Request (NCACR),” Diaz says. “That’s a key certification so Canadian police agencies can access essential information like plates and warrants.”

Leveraging the power of public cloud platforms has been an emphasis for Tecbound from the start. “Approximately 90% of our customers maintain workloads or data in the cloud, primarily using Microsoft products like Azure and Office 365,” notes Diaz. “When companies use on-premises servers, they’re basically locked in to that infrastructure, with little room for flexibility or growth. But when you move to the cloud, you can quickly introduce new technology or services while scaling resources up or down securely and easily.”

Tecbound is alert to the challenges presented by cloud migration. In addition to maintaining fully compliant environments and systems that work as smoothly as they did on-premises, Diaz constantly emphasizes business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) preparedness.

“We put a great deal of effort into cybersecurity, and BCDR planning is integral to secure operations,” Diaz says. “Even though cloud solutions like Microsoft Azure are usually reliable, we want to ensure readiness to minimize potential downtime. What happens if Microsoft Azure has a service outage? What if an administrative account gets compromised? If the worst happens, we must have a plan to have workloads backed up and replicated to recover our customers’ environment as soon as possible.”

Tecbound relies on Datto Backup for Microsoft Azure, a complete BCDR solution with predictable costs for MSPs. Datto Backup for Microsoft Azure provides hourly replication to the secure Datto Cloud, daily backup verification, and optimal recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) performance.

Datto’s solution helps Diaz and his team overcome two critical shortcomings that he sees with Microsoft’s native Azure Backup — security concerns and the time required to restore virtual machines (VMs).

“From a security standpoint with Azure Backup, if an admin account somehow got compromised, it’s game over — there is no way to recover anything if a bad actor deletes the data,” he explains. “With Datto, there are many layers of security and redundancy that allow us to know with certainty that backups will be accessible, no matter what.

“Additionally, when we tested Microsoft’s Azure Backup, we saw that it took anywhere from two to six hours to restore a big VM. Datto Backup for Microsoft Azure allows us to create a virtualized server in just minutes to establish disaster recovery and business continuity for our customers. It’s a couple of clicks, and you’re up and running.”