Online backup for Project Network

Project Network was formed in 1997 by Alan Vinton and Jim Davidson: two industry professionals who recognised a gap in the market for a dynamic and flexible team of project managers who could effectively manage large scale IT deployments on behalf of Tier 1 service providers. More recently, the focus of the business has diversified into technical consultancy, business support and professional services with Project Management still a core offering.

In 2010, The Project Network transitioned to an LLP model, forming Project Network LLP, with its employees becoming partners in the business. This established the company’s core ethos, which is driven by partnership. Partnership not only in terms of its client base, but also within the very fabric of the business: its people. Partner members, who work within Project Network, have taken part ownership of the company and are intrinsically focussed on seeing it succeed.

Challenges
As an IT service provider, Project Network prides itself on offering a single point of contact for all customer IT requirements. In order to ensure that clients consistently receive a very high level of service, Project Network is always on the lookout for new companies to partner with in order to bolster and improve the services that it can offer to its customers. New services also serve as a means of creating additional revenue streams. All services are thoroughly vetted before roll-out to ensure that customers will have an excellent level of service.

When Project Network first contacted Redstor, it already had an existing offsite backup technology but was experiencing some challenges in using it to effectively protect the data of one of their clients. A third party suggested to Project Network that they contact Redstor to evaluate Redstor’s Online Backup service.

The requirement was cost-sensitive and was intended to replace another offsite backup service for the end-user in question so the transition would need to be a smooth one.

“With a good tape or disk backup solution, any business will tell you that technical issues can be resolved eventually but there is nothing worse than spending all night rebuilding a server, only to discover that the backup had failed in the first place. Redstor’s Online Backup is perfect for our customer base, as it removes the need for time consuming backups and the risk of corrupted media; providing peace of mind, easy monitoring and notification of any issues with a backup.”

Redstor Online Backup is a simple and proven business grade offsite backup solution. Currently protecting the data of many thousands of customers, it provides them with the ability to perform restores quickly and test their DR plans with ease.

The service ensures critical data is encrypted, deduplicated and compressed before leaving the customer network and remains encrypted whilst in transit and at rest in Redstor’s 2 highly secure and geographically separate UK datacentres. Typically the service is more cost-effective, quicker in both backup and restores and more flexible than in-house backup solutions.

Due to Redstor’s heritage in providing storage and backup solutions since 1998 and cloud services since 2005, Project Network is able to offer its clients a backup solution that is referenceable and currently protects the data of many thousands of customers.
In addition to this, Redstor’s 9001 and 27001 ISO accreditations offer peace of mind that the systems and processes in place to manage customer data are of a very high standard.
Since the initial roll-out, a number of other customers have been brought on board Redstor’s cloud backup platform including Project Network themselves. This means that Project Network’s clients can have confidence in the fact that Project Network practice what they preach.

More recently, in 2012, Project Network began encountering much larger data volumes in their client environments. In order to continue to manage all client environments effectively, Project Network has begun reselling Redstor’s enterprise cloud backup service, Online Backup Plus which is suited to large datasets and complex environments.

Project Network was itself initially using Redstor’s Online Backup service but after their data grew year on year, they themselves moved to Redstor Online Backup Plus in Jan 2013.

Results
Since the start of the partnership, Project Network has been able to resell Redstor’s services to a number of new clients.

Project Network has consistently experienced a high level of satisfaction from their customers purchasing Redstor’s services, reflecting not only the quality of the products, but the longevity and sustainability of this new revenue stream.

The company has also experienced an easy and open working relationship with Redstor. Matt Bland, Project Network’s Account Manager at Redstor, is only ever a phone call away, works to quickly resolve any issues that may occur and is able to provide expert assistance in qualifying opportunities and addressing customer concerns.