Harnessing BCDR Automation with Axcient and Atera

Obviously, all our webinars are recorded, including this one. All webinars are hosted on the Atera events website, so you can always go back there and locate all of our on-demand and upcoming webinars. This session will be shared with you within the next two days. You’ll also get a copy of the Cyber Threat Offense and Defense ebook that will be shared within the email. I invite you to please type your questions or comments to our presenters in the Q&A box. We will be addressing those at the end of the session, but we’ll also address those as the speakers present. At the end of the webinar, we will have a very short survey—promise, just four questions—that I’d love your response to as it helps us improve and bring topics of interest. So without further ado, let’s get started. 

Today we have Axient with us. Atera has an app center within the Atera platform; it’s really a marketplace of integrated and diverse IT solutions. Axient is one of those solutions available to Atera customers to provision through the Atera platform. Part of the value is obviously the disruptive pricing that we offer, the tight integration with Atera which we’ll talk about during the session, and the consolidated billing through Atera. We’ll hear more from Corey today about how he’s leveraging and using that integration within Atera. Gentlemen, I’d like to invite you to get on camera. Welcome to our webinar today. We have two Coreys with us today. You’re all on mute. Hello, welcome. 

Corey Hintz: Hello everyone. 

Peter: Hello. 

Muna: Wonderful, thank you for joining us. I’d love for you to introduce yourselves. Maybe we’ll start with Corey Horton from Capital Data Solutions. 

Corey Horton: Yes, my name is Corey Horton. I run a company called Capital Data Solutions that I started about 18 years ago in the DC metro area. We provide IT support to small businesses that want to focus on managing and running their business every day and letting us handle their tech. I’ve been using Atera for quite some time and I’m a recent Axient customer. I’ve just onboarded with them and it’s a wonderful product, and I’m very happy to be here today to talk about it. 

Muna: Welcome Corey, thank you very much. Peter? 

Peter: Hi everyone, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world joining us today. My name is Peter Caliguri. I’m the senior strategic account manager here over at Axient, where I manage the relationship between Axient and Atera. Happy to be here and thanks for having me. 

Muna: Welcome, thank you Peter. And Corey Hintz, last but not least. 

Corey Hintz: Perfect, yes. Hey everybody, thank you for joining today. I really do appreciate your time. I head our sales engineering team here at Axient, so if you have any kind of technical questions regarding capabilities or the trial process, just put them in the chat. Happy to help out. 

Muna: Wonderful, welcome. Thank you. So I will hand over to Peter. I’ll be there in the background looking at the questions, so just reminding you all, feel free to type in your questions as we go along and we will be addressing those towards the end. Peter, over to you. 

Peter: Sounds great, thanks Muna. I really do appreciate it. For all of you who don’t know who Axient is, starting from a high level, we are a backup and disaster recovery vendor offering three different core products, two of which are currently available for trial and purchase on the Atera platform. We’re going to be focusing primarily on our X360 Recover platform today, which is a business continuity and disaster recovery solution for backing up servers and workstations. More importantly, we have those other two core products as well: X360 Cloud, which is also available through Atera, providing Office 365 and Google Workspace backup. We are coming live with Atera soon with a file sync and share solution called X360 Sync. So more to come on that, but focusing on X360 Recover, we want to start out with an introductory slide on how exactly we differentiate ourselves in the market and more importantly, how we design a product that really aims to be as simple as possible when it comes to addressing different business cases and needs. We wanted to really hone in on addressing a bunch of different use cases in the market, especially in a post-COVID world where there are instances where customers don’t need to have an appliance on-site. We’ve gone through several evolutions of the product and made sure to address each individual area of focus in our X360 Recover products. We are very malleable with our product, whether that be endpoint backup for remote desktops, no hardware BDR on-site with a direct-to-cloud solution where an agent is deployed on the server or workstation that vaults directly to one of our data centers. That’s another option. We have the traditional turnkey BDR, so if you did want to have an appliance on-site, whether that means you want to lease one or buy one from us directly or repurpose your own device, we offer that flexibility as well. Additionally, in the public cloud space with Google Cloud, Azure, AWS, we offer the ability to replicate out of those specific public cloud data centers into our own and are working on maturing that area of the product to accommodate those business needs. Essentially, we’re trying to address as many needs of our MSPs as possible with our X360 Recover products. 

When it comes to simplicity, we’re also looking to address a few different areas with X360 Recover from a business standpoint. We all know there are three key areas that MSPs focus on: how much money you can save or make, your ability to recover in a timely fashion, and meeting compliance standards. With Axient and our X360 Recover product, we’re looking to enhance your economics by reducing overhead charges and variable costs, creating a product with a simple pricing structure that allows for sufficient margin. We also aim to ensure reliable recovery times, incorporating various automation tools to expedite recovery processes, whether that be enabling local cache options or using our Virtual Office spin-up with our Runbooks feature, which Corey will touch on later. We want to make sure all your compliance standards are met, and Corey will discuss AutoVerify, another automated tool built into our system that captures screenshots to ensure compliance and provides digestible reports that you can share with your clients. These are the three main areas we focused on when building more automation into the product, keeping simplicity at the forefront.

Experience Of course, we have the pleasure of having Corey Horton from Capital Data Solutions with us. Corey and I had a wonderful conversation last week prior to this webinar, so I’m really happy to have you on board here, Corey. I’d like to use the next few minutes to ask a couple of questions. First and foremost, I know you started out with a little bit of an introduction, but we’d love to hear more about who Capital Data Solutions is and your experience in the MSP world, if you don’t mind starting from ground zero. 

Corey Horton: Not a problem, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it very much. About 18 years ago, after having worked for others for about 13 years in various roles such as systems engineer, trainer, software developer, and more, I finally found my niche as a systems administrator for various companies. Eventually, I found my way into being a tech who serviced lots of clients in different spaces and disciplines. I noticed that as I was doing that work, people did not want to call for support. People were very apprehensive, and I kind of wondered why that was. My approach has always been to go to a place and, if you have a client in need of a solution, you should leave that place with the person feeling better than when you initially arrived. I noticed that a lot of people were really not happy with their IT departments, so I started to focus on a customer-based approach. I spent extra time with people to understand exactly what the issues were and made efforts to make people feel comfortable calling IT. At one point, I saw an invoice and noticed how much I was being billed out. I thought, “Man, I’m not worth this! How are you guys getting this much money from me?” As a junior tech, I felt we needed to focus more on what the customers needed. Eventually, I got so frustrated that I decided to move on. I couldn’t do it anymore. I watched other techs who didn’t really care about the customers and weren’t treating them as individuals. I believed I could deliver IT services in a different fashion, so I hung my shingle about 18 years ago. At first, it was a break-fix type of scenario. Eventually, as the world changed, I didn’t have to get on a plane, highway, or walk someone through a support call blindly. I could do a screen share and consolidate my environment to work remotely and be more productive. I transitioned to the MSP model and went in search of tools. Initially, you had to cobble your tools together from five or six different sources. Now, I can use an Atera solution and have everything I used to piece together on my own. I can plug in the Axient solution and handle tasks that used to be maddening, like searching for a tape that was never on site or was in someone’s bag or a vault at a bank. 

Having everything from a single pane of glass, being able to deliver what my clients need—remote monitoring every single day in five-minute time slices, and performing restores with the click of a mouse—it’s a dream come true. I come from an age where none of these capabilities existed. It’s a great time to be in IT. These tools are fantastic, and I will tell you that I’ve used almost every disaster recovery tool you can imagine over the years. Axient is fantastic. Once I got the interface, I just got it and was an instant convert. It’s very robust, easy to use, and allows me to do things I couldn’t do before at a really great price point for my clients. For example, I can now give them hourly snapshots and restore. A guy comes in, creates a spreadsheet, works on it all day, and then something goes badly wrong. In the past, I would have said, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you. That spreadsheet didn’t exist during last night’s backup pass.” Now, I can say, “Hey, I have five versions. Which one would you like?” and five minutes later, he’s back in business. 

I started out a long time ago with 8-bit micros and made my way up to this wonderful age where everyone has a computer in their pocket. It’s a great time to be here. Thank you guys so much for having me. I’m a small guy, and you have treated me like you would treat any other client. I’m a small shop; on any given day, we’re one to three people, depending on our needs. I can ramp up to four or five, but I don’t have 35 techs or a massive operation. You have treated me with the same level of respect as you would anyone else. I’m really happy to talk about my experience with the product today. We will continue to grow, and I will continue to tell other people about it. Thank you all for having me. 

Peter: Yeah, of course, Corey. We really do appreciate the kind words and are glad to hear that your experience so far has gone off to such a great start. I do have a couple of other questions for the audience’s sake as well. Since you’ve had such an experience in the MSP space for almost 20 years and have tried every different type of disaster recovery solution, what were some of the main features you noticed that were different with Axient compared to other options in the market? 

Corey Horton: First, I have to plug the Axient-Atera partnership. The price point is unmatched. Believe me, I’ve tried them all. At the end of the day, no matter what I’m doing for a customer, if they can’t get their data, they don’t have a business. I tell every client, “I don’t care how wonderful your office looks, how fancy the furniture is, or how modern your equipment is. Without your data, I can pull one cable in that server room, and the entire company stops.” It’s important to have a robust backup solution. What I found with Axient was, first and foremost, implementation was very smooth and very fast. Also, the people who helped onboard me were excellent. No matter how good the product is, if I don’t have someone onboarding me and helping me through the process, what difference does it make? I had seamless help from the first gentleman who spoke with me on the phone to explain the product to when I called tech support several times at odd times during the day just to see if someone would answer. I was able to get the same person on the phone, which was amazing. When I requested assistance, they spent all the time necessary with every question I had. We did screen shares and they helped me set it up at each and every client. 

It’s been a really wonderful experience, and you delivered on everything you told me you would. My previous solution was not so great. When things went sideways—and they will—it’s how you handle it. I have every bit of confidence that you guys will stand behind me. With my previous solution, something went terribly wrong—the billing didn’t go properly, some data was lost because of a crash, and there was no accountability. It’s been a very smooth onboarding process. People held my hand along the way. I’m not too proud to ask for help even though I’ve been doing this for 30-plus years. I had hair when I started in this industry. You guys have helped me all along the way. I’ve talked to people at every single level, from the support folks to Salesforce. You guys have been amazing. Thank you so very much. 

Peter: Of course, Corey. To that point, for the audience’s knowledge, we offer 365/24/7 support for X360 Recover. So any odd hours, give us a try from the support standpoint. From an onboarding perspective, we provide free product certifications within the tool as well as one-on-one training with one of our trainers here at Axient. We want to ensure ease of deployment and a pleasant onboarding experience right from the start. You also have an entire support system at Atera, so no matter which avenue you choose, we’ll take care of you, especially as you get started.

Just in the interest of time, Corey, real quick, we’d love to hear about your automation experiences with the Axient solution. What are some of the automation features you are looking to test out more, keeping the theme of harnessing automation? 

Corey Horton: Absolutely. Fortunately, we’ve had the opportunity to use the product to restore data for clients, and it’s worked just fine. We’re currently working on using the ability to grab a snapshot of the server, spin up a virtual machine, and restore that image. In cases of hardware failure or extended downtime, we can spin up a virtual machine and use VPN to connect our firewall to your data center, allowing users to resume work while waiting for repairs. This happens at least once or twice a year, and traditionally, we’d be waiting for a part with people trying to find things to do. Now, we have the ability to get a virtual machine spun up, which we’re working on in our lab. We’ve had real-world scenarios where this would have been very helpful, such as ransomware attacks or power supply failures. We’re looking forward to offering our clients this capability. Peter: Awesome. I really appreciate the color there, Corey. Hopefully, if you do go through any instances where you need help, just let us know. We try to make it as simple as possible to get those servers virtualized. 

With that said, thanks again, Corey. I really appreciate the testimonial and your experience with Axient. I want to shift gears a bit to talk more about the technical side and automation features, just in the interest of time. We have Corey Hintz here, our Sales Engineering Manager, who will dive into the automation capabilities and answer some of the technical questions from the chat. Corey, the stage is yours. 

Corey Hintz: Perfect, thank you. Corey, thank you again for the honest feedback. We’re always looking for areas to improve, and honesty is key. Switching gears to the technical and feature side of things with Recover, I’ve seen a lot of questions popping up in the chat. It’s great to see, so please keep them coming. We’ll be going through those and hopefully answering all of them. If not, we’ll get back to you. Peter went over a slide earlier today that covered endpoint backup, turnkey BDR, no BDR, and public cloud backup. This slide illustrates the overall flexibility and simplicity of our solution, allowing you to back up all four needs with one solution. Historically, you needed dedicated backup solutions for file-level backup, AWS, Azure, and on-prem BDR. Our solution can handle all these verticals while minimizing the number of items in your tech stack, keeping training costs down. 

We offer deployment flexibility with our solution, allowing you to choose between appliance-based or direct-to-cloud-based variants. Both use the same core technology under the hood; the main difference is how you want it deployed. If you need minimal downtime tolerance and virtualization within seconds, you’ll want the appliance-based variant. Direct-to-cloud is extremely capable, deploying an agent directly to the cloud, skipping the need for an on-prem appliance. You can have an optional storage target on-prem for your direct-to-cloud agents, expediting downloads from the cloud if you don’t have the tolerance for cloud-only solutions.

By nature, you would have your on-premise storage target to be the expediter, essentially transferring data using your local network instead of your WAN network. There is a lot of flexibility here; there really is no right or wrong. It boils down to what kind of tolerance your SLA and your clients are expecting you to have during a major data recovery or data outage. Moving on from there, BYOD or BYOC—someone asked here in chat, and I appreciate the question regarding compatibility. Do we have to use Axient hardware, or can you bring your own hardware? You can absolutely bring your own hardware. There is a lot of flexibility in that regard. You can repurpose other solutions’ hardware or appliances. If you are a Dell shop, HP shop, Lenovo, or whatever that might be, you can continue to utilize that hardware relationship very easily. We will give you the ISO image—the same exact image we use on our hardware or in our cloud—to deploy at your own facility or on your own hardware. If you have your own colo or data center, you can easily spin up your own cloud target as well. You are also able to use both Axient cloud and your own cloud for those extremely security-focused or mandated clients. # Worry-Free Storage and Billing Worry-free storage offers extremely easy billing. We provide flat fee pricing including storage, based on the quantity of workstations and servers you want to back up. It’s very simple, with straightforward SKUs, and easy to see what’s going on with your overall storage as well as the billing side of things. 

We take security very seriously at Axient. One big piece of this is the solution’s underlying core architecture, which is chain-free. Virtually every other solution in the market uses some variation of a chain-based architecture, whether it’s forward or backward chaining. The downside of chain-based architecture is that each link in the chain, i.e., each backup in the dataset, is a potential point of failure that can corrupt the entire backup chain. With our chain-free solution, if a snapshot from two months ago becomes corrupt or is deleted, you only lose that affected point in time without breaking any dependencies before or after that point of failure. Chain-free architecture also offers speed benefits. There is no need to convert your snapshots into a bootable image. All your backups are stored in a native virtualized state using our chain-free technology. In the event you need to virtualize on the appliance, it literally takes seconds without needing a staging area or conversion to VMDK or VHD. 

Air gap technology is not new, but our implementation is unique. It separates the data deletion request from the data deletion execution. If a hacker or bad actor attempts to delete a system from the Axient cloud or appliance, it will still reside within the air gap technology, presenting as if it is deleted. This leads the bad actor to believe they have succeeded, potentially releasing a ransomware payload under the false impression that backups are deleted. Our support team can reinstate the data within minutes or hours, ensuring no data loss. Furthermore, no single individual at Axient has the authority to delete a system ahead of its air gap purge cycle. If you need a system deleted immediately for legal reasons, you must provide proof of identity and a ticket request before we will delete any client data. We have an A+ rated security scorecard from a third-party unbiased company, rating various aspects like DNS integrity, package dates, website integrity, and penetration testing. We are proud to be one of the few vendors in the space with an A+ security rating.

One major benefit of our solution is the auto-verify capability. If you are using the appliance-based variant, your backups are automatically verified every single day. This provides an up-to-date status of your virtualization and data integrity capabilities, 100% automated every night. You won’t need to touch it. If you are backing up 100 systems across 10 different clients, all of those systems will generate a boot screenshot verification every night, sent via email or directly into ConnectWise PSA or other PSAs that can ingest emails into tickets. The auto-verify feature doesn’t just provide a login screen screenshot; it performs deeper integrity checks of the backup data using native Windows VSS and DLLs. This ensures that what you see in the screenshot is what you get during bare metal restore operations or major DR scenarios. 

Virtual Office is our cloud virtualization layer within the Axient cloud. If you need to virtualize one system or an entire client site, you can do so quickly and automatically within Virtual Office. It is designed to be a self-provision and self-deprovision service. You can allocate RAM, CPU cores, and various networking settings, including establishing a VPN connection from your firewall to the Axient cloud back to your client site. We offer three VPN options, including IPC routing and port forwarding DHCP. You can automate the entire Virtual Office process via our runbooks, assigning boot priority and CPU cores, and setting wait times for systems to boot in the correct order. For example, you can ensure your AD server boots first before your SQL database to avoid issues. This allows you to virtualize an entire site with a single click, getting everything up and running within minutes. Many MSPs use Virtual Office for cloud DR testing, providing clients with cloud DR tests every six months or annually. It’s incredibly easy to set up with runbooks, ensuring your DR playbook is fully up to date. 

You have the ability to perform incremental vault recovery, simplifying the failback process. If you fail over to the Axient cloud, you can stay there as long as needed—hours, days, or months. This is useful in situations like natural disasters. Incremental vault recovery allows you to restore snapshots generated in the cloud back to your appliance incrementally, avoiding the need to replicate all data at once. This feature is also useful for replacing third-party BDR appliances. You can deploy a DTC agent on a Windows machine, get backups running, replicate to the cloud, and incrementally recover back to your appliance target. We are happy to walk you through this process if needed. 

Peter: Thanks, Corey. We do have some questions from the chat. One from Joseph Smith regarding the fair use policy. We made an adjustment on May 1 of this year, changing our fair use policy from five terabytes per server down to three terabytes. This was primarily due to costs associated with our data centers. 

Corey Hintz: Each endpoint, server, or workstation provides a pooled amount of storage at the MSP level. If you have 100 server licenses, you will have the bundled storage pooled to your MSP level, allowing you to mix and match storage across all clients. This simplifies storage allocation without needing to assign storage per client. 

Peter: Another question from Shu regarding whether this works only for the Atera MSP version or the IT department version as well. We primarily focus on working in the channel with MSPs, but we do have IT department customers through Atera. It should be applicable in both settings, but the tools are designed specifically for MSPs. 

Corey Hintz: Feel free to ask more questions. We’re here to help and provide clarity on any concerns or details you need.

Jason asked a good question: can we get clarification on the ability to centralize all clients’ workstations with no need for interface or interaction with the end user during the installation process? Yes, you do have the ability to silently deploy the agent without any end user interaction or disruption. The agent is going to run headless as well, so there’s no desktop icon or system tray icon for end users to mess around with, either inadvertently or intentionally. There is no front-end way for end users to interact, nor is there a need for them to interact with anything. Great question, Jason. 

Peter: Corey, can you try to help tackle this one as well? Are backup schedules and alerts managed and viewed through the Atera portal? My understanding is that we keep those portals separate, so all management of backup schedules and alerts should be happening within the Axient product. 

Corey Hintz: Correct, yes. That’s going to be done within the Axient product itself, so the Axient portal. It is very convenient though; you just log into your product portal, and it’s just a single click to SSO directly into the product UI. You can see every single client of yours, every single workstation, every single server VM, all of the data in your cloud, and how many systems you have in the cloud. All of that is going to be in that one single portal, which is the Axient portal. But again, you just click a single button, and it will single sign you on directly into that product UI. 

Muna: I think that this has been, at least for me, a very intriguing discussion. I want to thank you gentlemen for your time. Corey Horton, thank you so much for taking the time and sharing your experience today. 

Corey Horton: Thank you. 

Muna: I want to remind our audience that we have a survey that will pop up right as soon as this ends, so please do take the time to answer the survey. If we did not get to your question, we will be responding and sending out the responses. I also want to remind you that we have a trial of Axient within the Atera app center, so please go ahead, check it out, and start your trial. We have a great team here that’s just here to support you, onboard you, and get you up and running, as Corey shared. I’m sure Corey will be more than happy to provide any additional insights from his end if you want to reach out. 

Corey Horton: Absolutely. 

Muna: So again, thank you everybody. Thank you so much for your time—speakers, attendees—and I hope to see you on our next webinar. Thank you, goodbye, and thanks. 

Peter: Thank you, everyone. 

Corey Hintz: Thank you all.