When it comes to Cloud Services, it’s hard for businesses to know where and when to start. According to Karen Purdy, the SaskTel Marketing Manager of Data Centre Services, Cloud Backup is a good starting point. It’s a managed service that's really easy to adopt regardless of the technical expertise within an organization,” said Purdy. “You can get your systems, data, and applications backed up daily for as low as nine dollars a month.”

Karen Purdy, Marketing Manager, Data Centre Services, SaskTel

To explain the value, Purdy said there were several Saskatchewan organizations that were hit with ransomware when they were trying to manage their own backups. “It just made a lot of sense for them to move to our Cloud Backup service because they don't have the resources to run these backups daily themselves,” said Purdy. “They set it up with us, it runs every night or whatever time of the day that they want, and if they ever have to go back and acquire one of the backups, they can do that themselves through the portal or they can reach out to SaskTel and have us do it for them."

With SaskTel Cloud Backup, customers can enable the system to automatically detect the presence of ransomware on their computer, desktop, or servers. Once a baseline of file activities is established after the first seven days, an alert is sent to the assigned individual when a large number of abnormal file activities are detected. File activities on the client computer are checked every five minutes. When an alert is sent, the customer can then clear the ransomware and restore the data from an older backup.

For businesses that are just starting out and haven’t yet invested in a lot of expensive servers and computer equipment, or for companies that need to retire out their old equipment and restart, Cloud Hosting should definitely be a consideration. SaskTel will completely manage and protect the IT infrastructure environment, providing the customer with a safe and secure environment that is monitored 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Data is kept safe and secure in a world-class SaskTel Data Centre in Regina or Saskatoon. Not only is Saskatchewan a geographically superior area for data centres, SaskTel owns the network that powers them. “What we find is when a customer comes and takes a tour of our data centre,” said Purdy, “they have to step back and ask themselves why they would try to replicate this themselves when it's right here, when it can be done through SaskTel and they don’t have to worry about it.”

“I remember one customer,” said Purdy. “He was the one IT guy for the company and he had a couple of people who helped him out, but he knew he was going to retire soon and he didn't want to leave anyone with the headache of managing the company’s IT infrastructure on a daily basis. He worked with us to move into our data centre so that his replacements could focus on the core business and not have to worry about the day-to-day operations of their data centre.”

For companies that have embraced technology and want to be hands on, there’s SaskTel Colocation. It’s a customizable solution where the customer maintains ownership and control over its equipment, data, and applications while SaskTel manages and maintains the data centre space that houses it. The customer doesn’t have the expense of building and managing its own data centre.

“SaskTel Colocation is really about streamlining,” said Purdy. “We have a few customers who really like to do this kind of thing themselves because they can. They can have their server environments, they can do their backups however they want to do them, to hard drives or tapes or whatever, but what it really comes down to is when they get SaskTel to manage it, it allows them to focus on their core business and not have to worry about making sure their servers are running and their environment is safe. It's really about making that decision to streamline their internal process and go to SaskTel as their preferred provider for a service they won't have to focus on themselves.”

For larger business customers that depend on technology for their operations, Cloud Disaster Recovery (CDR) can deliver during an hour of need. “We have a lot of different clients that use this service,” said Purdy. “If larger businesses can’t access certain information for an hour, they know exactly the kind of revenue impact that will have on their business, so uptime is critical for them because it's how they make their money.” CDR protects the customer’s virtual environments and replicates them in near real-time. It allows the business to rewind and recover anything in minutes, from any point in time within the defined journaling period, direct to the customer’s recovery site. Whether it’s the whole site or an individual virtual machine, the business is back up and running, literally in minutes.

Speaking to price, Purdy believes a business should look at what they save, not what they spend. She recalls meeting with one of her customers, an implement dealer, to try to put a dollar value on the Cloud Services he was subscribing to. He really didn't know, so he called in the manager for the service department. According to Purdy, “the owner said, ‘hey John, I'd like you to think about the impact that this is having on our organization.’ He replied like he'd already done the math. “I know exactly how much it impacts us. It saves us about $30,000 a year."

In addition to cost savings, SaskTel Cloud Services help businesses save time and make more reliable plans for their business. Employee turnover can disrupt technology planning, putting a business's long-term strategy at risk. Working with SaskTel not only eliminates that risk, it provides you with experts who understand your plan and can identify other opportunities to delivery on it.

That kind of home team partnership is another differentiator that Purdy believes makes SaskTel unique in the Cloud Services market is the fact that SaskTel is the home team. We have these knowledgeable technical resources who are available to assist customers,” said Purdy. “They understand the customers’ environment and you can actually talk to them. It's not like sending an e-mail and hoping for the best. You can actually work with our people. We know the large international suppliers can't say that.”

If you want to find out how SaskTel Cloud Services can help you spend less time focused on IT, and more time focused on your business, connect directly with Karen Purdy on LinkedIn.

Already a SaskTel Business customer? If you have any questions about our products and services, please contact your SaskTel Representative by chatting online or requesting a call back at this link: https://www.sasktel.com/about-....