Updated on October 29, 2020

With SaskTel Cloud Backup currently being offered for a free three-month trial, we thought it would be a good time to talk to Karen Purdy, Marketing Manager for Data Centre and IT Managed Services at SaskTel.

“Demystifying the cloud” has become a common expression. How would you explain the cloud?

First, you need to know a bit of history. In the past, companies would invest in creating their own server infrastructures—their own little mini data centres—and in order to do that, they made significant investments in cooling, power, and a safe space for equipment that’s secure.

The notion of cloud is you’re not going to do that yourself; you’re going to use another company’s infrastructure and data centre. I think when a lot of people think about the cloud, they think of Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google, but SaskTel should be included in that list since we have our own cloud that our customers can use.

Then what is Cloud Backup?

Cloud Backup is simply a service that backs up your data to the SaskTel Data Centre. It’s a very affordable way to take care of your environment and know it’s being backed up once a day. It’s a great entry level product for a company that doesn’t want to do it themselves. We have a customer in Saskatchewan, a bank that every night would copy whatever files they needed and back them up on a USB stick. Then, they would go down the street to another bank and put it in their safety deposit box. Cloud Backup is great for them. We set it up, we manage it, we fix any problems, and they never have to worry about it again.

What kind of businesses benefit the most?

I was at the dog park a few years ago and met a woman who runs an art appraisal business. She works out of her home and told me her laptop crashed for whatever reason. It took four days to get things back up and running, and there were a lot of things that she lost. Cloud Backup is definitely for her, but it’s not limited to single-person businesses.

Any small business can benefit from Cloud Backup. They probably don’t have a dedicated IT person. It’s probably someone like an office manager, for example, who’s doing a bunch of other things and they’ve added it to their list. This is a good product for companies that don’t have a lot of specialized resources because they can set it up once and then they never have to worry about it again.

We have larger customers as well that love it, especially those that have locations in both Saskatoon and Regina. Cloud Backup can work for every size of business, but enterprise businesses are more likely to have it already incorporated in another product.

Does Cloud Backup protect data from ransomware and malware?

You can set up Cloud Backup to automatically detect if there’s anything foreign in your computer, your desktop, or your servers. For the first week, it will monitor your activity and get a baseline of change. If you typically make a hundred changes in a week and all of a sudden it serges to thousands a week, that irregularity in the amount of file activity may be caused by ransomware or malware. An alert will be triggered and you can restore your system from a backup that was saved before the irregularity occurred.

What makes SaskTel different?

We are local both in terms of our people and data. We have extremely knowledgeable technical resources that are available to our customers if they ever need any kind of help. With large competitors, you might send them an email and hope for the best. We actually have people that will walk you through it, whatever you need.

And another thing is we understand the customer’s environment. We know what’s in there because we set it up, we monitor it, we watch it, and we have hundreds of servers that we do this for every day. Some of those other cloud providers are huge, but they aren't local, and do they really care about your data environment? We do.

What are people saying about SaskTel Cloud Backup?

When people take a tour of our Tier III Data Centre, they will often say, “Why would I do this myself? Do it for me. I’ll gladly pay you for it if I never have to worry about it again.”

Is there anything else you’d like to tell our viewers?

If you’re not using Cloud Backup, now is the perfect time to try it. Just get in touch with our team and we’ll set you up.

If you have any questions about our products and services, please contact your SaskTel Representative, request a call back, or call 1.844.SASKTEL (1.844.727.5835).