Latest / The Tech Matchmaker / Sky Data Vault: Stop $150K/Day Downtime with Real Microsoft 365 & Private Cloud Backups
Transcript
- Gina Gibson: Welcome to the Tech Matchmaker, the show where contact center challenges meet their perfect tech match. I'm your host, Gina Gibson, and in just 15 minutes, we serve up the smartest, coolest innovation shaking up the contact center industry. Whether you're searching for your next solution or just love staying ahead of the curve, we've got the insights to keep you in the know. Let's dive in and discover what's next. I promise you it's going to be fun. Thanks for hanging out with us on the Tech Matchmaker. I hope today's spotlight sparked some fresh ideas and real solutions for your contact center. Want to dive deeper into the tech we featured? Hit up the show notes for all the links and extras and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if there's a challenge you want us to tackle, don't be shy, reach out. I'll catch you soon with more innovation, more use cases and more ways to keep your business moving forward. Good morning, everybody. Today we are chatting with Sarah Freeman, is the Director of Cloud Services West from Sky Data Vault. Sarah, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you with us here today. Sarah Freeman: Hi Gina, thanks for having me. Gina Gibson: So let's start with the basics. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about yourself? Sarah Freeman: Yeah, I'm reluctantly tell you that I have 21 years in the tech industry. I started ⁓ with an reseller way back in the early ⁓ 2000s. I a networking background, infrastructure background, and I'm a cat lady. Gina Gibson: Stay curious, stay bold, and keep exploring what's next. Love it. I was just going to say we always ask somebody something that we wouldn't find out about you on LinkedIn and I'm guessing Crazy Cat Lady isn't one of your qualifications there. Sarah Freeman: You know, it might not be. keep that stuff off of LinkedIn, but I'm certified. Gina Gibson: Love Tell us give us your elevator pitch for sky date of all Sarah Freeman: Sky Data Vault. So we help businesses eliminate the risk of data loss, costly downtime, ensuring that their critical information is always available, protected, recoverable. Our clients sleep better knowing that their operations can continue no matter what happens, whether it's ransomware, whether it's human error, system failures. We do this with our private cloud infrastructure backups, disaster recovery, and SAS backups. Gina Gibson: Excellent. And why do you think like, is data access and not just storage becomes such a critical issue for modern organizations? Sarah Freeman: Ooh, that's a really good question. One, right, we're talking outdated equipment, we're needing people on site to manage these things. So putting stuff up into the cloud makes it easier for dispersed teams to work on things. I think that's probably one of the biggest. ⁓ AI has a lot to do with that. Where are you keeping those workloads? How are the people working on it? So think between those two things, the cloud industry is, especially private ⁓ is ramping up to have a really big season. Gina Gibson: And then how do you guys like how to Skype all data? How do you differ from traditional kind of data loss prevention or security tools? what is for somebody that's kind of like, well, I think I'm covered. What would you say? Hey, here's our differentiator. And here's why you need us. ⁓ Sarah Freeman: I hear that a lot and I think it's because teams are shifting. So we're a managed service, we're not just a software provider and that's what a lot of companies have is a software that they manage to do their backups or they're building their own site somewhere, whether it's in-house, they have a server that's ready to plug in, they have it at their house or in different locations somewhere, but really management of that and that's where we make a differentiator. So we're not just a plug and play. software. We manage that for you and we take those workloads off of the business plate so that most people can concentrate on making the business function and also modernizing it. Gina Gibson: I love that. What do you, what's next for Sky? Like how do you see your product evolving or your role in the managed space evolving with like how is AI impacting you? Sarah Freeman: You know, it doesn't. just makes us grow. So ⁓ get this question a lot. It makes my job easier for my day-to-day stuff that I use it for. But terms of customers, it really doesn't have an impact. We're not doing anything special. We don't have any plans to. ⁓ We're infrastructure. We're of the boring side of technology. But we're your security layer. So say that your customer is about to start embarking on some large AI project, right? You want to back that data up before you start messing with that data. Say you build whatever server to handle an internal language model. Where are you going to store that? How are you going to protect that? How are you backing that up? So we're not making a shift in the AI, although we're shifting and how would I see over the next couple of years is very fast growth. We will definitely, I would say doubling and I was looking at my numbers and like, no, actually we're going to quadruple within the next two years because again, everybody's, need to protect your data. You're moving workloads into the cloud and that's freeing up the time for your internal, whether you're application specialists ⁓ or your cloud technicians, your people on staff, we're freeing up their time to be able to work on those AI projects and put them into place. Gina Gibson: And you touched on something a little bit, sir, and you said like, know you hear it all the time, but for those people that don't think they need to worry about storage. ⁓ I know when you and I chatted last week, I think you said something ⁓ it was really good. said like, you know, Microsoft back up your stuff for like AWS, it's not backed up. Or can you talk a little bit about maybe some misconceptions that people have where they think they're being backed up or they think they're saved or that it's secure and really it's not? Sarah Freeman: Well, yeah, because a lot of companies and I'll extend this into it really becomes applicable when we're talking about SharePoint and companies that use SharePoint a lot. Yeah, we want to save our email. Yeah, we want those. I'm sure I have 10,000 emails stored up just in case I need to pull that email at one time. But it's really more so the data, your SharePoint, your OneDrive. A lot of people come to me and say, ⁓ yeah, it's in OneDrive. OneDrive isn't a backup. It's just a repository. It takes it off of your local computer and it puts it in the cloud, but that's not backed up. And it explicitly states on Microsoft website in their CSA that they recommend you use a third party or software back up your data because they're not responsible for it. If there is data loss, you cannot call 1-800-Microsoft and say, I need something from 100 days ago. I need something from 300 days ago. It just doesn't, it's not there. And that extends beyond Microsoft too. We have other SaaS backup products. If you don't mind me talking about it, ⁓ we've Gina Gibson: Absolutely. Sarah Freeman: If you're okay with that, we've expanded into Salesforce and Entra ID. So for Salesforce, it's really opened my eyes. You you think about that, that's your CRM, but a lot of that is custom critical for a lot of companies. They function everything off of Salesforce. They have their UCAS, they have their contact center built into it. They have a lot of customizations built it that have cost thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. And those customizations are, if you're not backing up that data, if you're not backing up that meta, where, who is, how is that, you know, how is that saved when, Salesforce has an incident, if you have ⁓ angry employee, if something happens and that data is gone, you don't have a way to recover that. There's, there's no safety net for you. Entra ID is another one too, that's very interesting, ⁓ which the, it's used to be called Azure Active Directory. How are you backing that up? You know, if you're, if you're, if that goes down. Your people can't work. They don't have access to their systems. if you lose it, which I've talked to a customer, their entire ID got wiped out. They now have to rebuild that entire system. If they had a backup, they could just call us up and boom, ⁓ get it uploaded. Gina Gibson: That's incredible. And how impactful for a business, Like to your point, like how long does that take to have to rebuild? That's incredible. Sarah Freeman: Yeah, that's, you know, and that's when talking about backups, that's one of my favorite questions is, okay, you have backups. How long does it take you to restore from a backup? of the first customers I talked to here, it's one of my favorite stories. He laughed and he said, it'll take me two weeks. said, okay, well, how much does that cost your company per day? And he said, I don't know. And he went and talked to C-suite. He came back the next day. They could not sign that paperwork fast enough. It was costing about 150,000 a day. Gina Gibson: Wow. Is there any other customer success stories you'd like to share with us? Because that one's super impactful. That's a lot of money. Sarah Freeman: You know, it is because it's that kind of thing that companies, that C-suite, right, they think it's happening in the background. They just assume that that data is there. ⁓ Another one that I really like is because we offer professional services on top of it. So we're a managed service. We can set up your infrastructure. We can manage your backups. We can run a DR playbook and help you build that to make sure that you have a disaster recovery plan and that it's tested. Gina Gibson: Mm-hmm. Sarah Freeman: But another thing we do is we add some professional services on top of that. So say my one specific customer, they wanted to migrate over to our private cloud, but this ⁓ director had just come into the position a few months prior and inherited what was built prior. And the active directory that they had in place was not suitable. ⁓ not a suitable environment and he didn't want to take that and bring it over into the new cloud and then have to deal with it. So we in our team as a service prior to that migration to help them clean up their Active Directory and some issues that they were having with it to make sure it was fully functional is exactly the way they wanted it before it came into our cloud. And that's really what differentiated us from the competition. They weren't able to offer that service. Gina Gibson: I love that. And it is, that's right. It's like white glove full service, basically. Yeah, that's wonderful. Sarah Freeman: It is. is. Yeah, I'm going to add, I'm going to have the cherry on top. That customer went back, came back talked to their trusted advisor and was happy with how easy the implementation was because it was white cloth. So we do as much as we can for you. Gina Gibson: That's wonderful. Is there anything I haven't asked you that you want to share with the audience as far as what services or anything else that you guys do? Sarah Freeman: You know, I think that's it. It's a short portfolio and I love that and that we do it well. So between the infrastructure, the backups, one thing I want to do, I do want to say, you know, it's not just an all or nothing thing coming into it. We might be talking about your entire environment, but ⁓ don't expect customers and they probably shouldn't just drag it all over and fix it in one shot, right? So we do a lot of what's called stretching into the cloud. So we'll start with some backups over here, do the workloads. Gina Gibson: Yeah. Sarah Freeman: And as maybe your contracts expire, your licenses come up for renewal, you start to move those workloads over into our cloud. And we call that expanding into the cloud, stretching into the cloud. So it's one by one. And it's not this huge overhaul. Now sometimes that does happen, and we're really good at those. But essentially, that's really the best way to look at it and work into it. And eventually, ⁓ you'll have your entire infrastructure over with us, if not some sort of hybrid option. Gina Gibson: That's wonderful. I've always heard of crawl, walk, run, but I haven't heard of stretching and I kind of like that. That's neat. That's great. to wrap things up, Sarah, I I've always been a fan of James Lipton. And so to end the podcast, we do a couple of rapid fire questions. what's your favorite word? Sarah Freeman: Yeah. Yeah, right. Yeah. Gina Gibson: what's your least favorite word? Sarah Freeman: I have a list of those. Can't. Can't is my least favorite word. Gina Gibson: And what excites you the most? Sarah Freeman: Sunrises and sunsets. really does, and helping people. Gina Gibson: it. Love it. If somebody wants more information on using sky data vault, who should they reach out to? Sarah Freeman: They should reach out to you, Gina. Gina Gibson: Excellent. And I know you mentioned on another trusted advisor and that's because you guys only work through partners you said correct Sarah? Sarah Freeman: We only work through partners through our trusted advisor channel that is correct. Gina Gibson: Excellent. Sarah, I want to thank you so much for joining us today and for your insights and for your great stories. was enlightening and wonderful to hear. So thanks so much for giving us your time today. Sarah Freeman: You're absolutely welcome and thank you for having me.