Adelaide MSP saves customer '$150,000 in 15 minutes'

Adelaide managed services provider Geek has claimed to save a local accounting firm $150,000 in 15 minutes.

The accounting firm, also based in Adelaide, had bought a Datto backup appliance under Geek's advice "hoping to never need it", but later saved thousands of dollars after a CryptoLocker ransomware attack in March.

"Their worst nightmare was realised when a staff member opened an AGL-branded scam email that generated a screen demanding thousands of dollars. All their files were encrypted, and totally inaccessible, including the main database. They were dead in the water," Geek founder and chairman Jon Paior said.

[Related: Two Aussie partners score Datto global awards]

"They later calculated that their old backup product would have taken at least six hours to fully restore those terabytes of data. With 120 employees, each hour of downtime would have cost them about $25,000, so the instant restore meant the return on their investment in the Datto business continuity solution was immense."

Geek has 17 staff that support business networks and systems nationally. The MSP worked with Datto to customise the backup appliance to suit the Australian market.

"We requested new features in the product that directly responded to the needs of Australian customers. These include customisable off-site replication, which means we can back up data to more flexible locations, and file-based backups, addressing the fact that customers have to pay for bandwidth in Australia," said Paior.

The Datto disaster recovery appliance creates and stores backup snapshots of a computer hard drive or network every five minutes. According to the vendor, it defeats CryptoLocker and other ransomware scams by providing instant access to the stored backup. Datto handles more than one million backups a week at its nine data centres around the world.

For its work, Geek was awarded with the Golden Datto Pioneer award last month at the vendor's annual partner summit held in the USA.