MSP360 Managed Backup vs Azure Backup: Which is a better fit?

Mike: Name is Mike. I serve as a senior product manager in the digital signage industry. And on a rating of one to five for the Azure platform, I would give it a four out of five. In comparing cloud hosting solutions, the other company we looked at was AWS or effectually known as Amazon Web Services. What it really came down to and the reason why we didn't go with AWS was how they host their servers. While they do have US-based server options, you can't always get a guarantee that your hosting will not be used overseas in places like China or otherwise. And that was something that was really big to us to have something domestic as well as to our customers that utilize our platform. So in analyzing and looking at the Azure platform, one of the things that really stood out to us was the fact that they had a guarantee for using US-based servers. A lot of the customers that utilize our services don't want their products or services able to be searched or used by foreign locations. So when we got that promise from them in our setup, that was really a big deal and it made our customers feel much more secure in utilizing us. One of the other reasons was the pricing model. Pricing was very flexible. While I won't say they're necessarily cheaper than some of the other services, but what they offer for that is very good. Easy access, very simple to turn on and turn off virtual machines. And our developers team can not only be in-house, but we have developers outside the US that help us with some of our development that have access to those servers as well. So for onboarding and transitioning, really easy. Our developers already had a pretty good background in the Azure platform. So there wasn't a whole lot for them to get caught up or trained on. It was more about transitioning our services we had into the Azure cloud. Now, prior to this, we didn't have another cloud service. This was our first foray into that platform or that type. So we were hosting everything at our location at our headquarters here in Florida. So what we ended up doing is transitioning a lot of those services directly off of our servers onto the Azure servers after spinning up a few VMs, and outside of reaching out to clients and changing where that service was being pulled from, the transition was pretty seamless. When looking at hosting services, one thing you might want to consider is what type of product and services you offer. Those products and services will sit on whatever servers you're utilizing and wherever in the world they're sitting. So if there's something that you'd like to keep more privatized or maybe away from could be or would be competitors, Azure might be a good choice considering that they can give you a little bit more of a clarification of where your data is hosted, sitting, and where it resides.