Cloud is central to the modern world of work, and Computing's annual Cloud Excellence Awards recognise and honour the people and companies innovating in this important space.
Backup and disaster recovery firm Assurestor is hoping for a win in the Cloud DR and Continuity Product of the Year category at the awards ceremony on the 21st September. We talked to business development director Stephen Young about the company's work in the last 12 months.
With an engineering background and a firm commitment to technical excellence and customer satisfaction, Stephen has founded and grown several successful technology businesses dating back to the 1980s. Specialising in areas ranging from traditional IT and consultancy through to system hosting and software development, Stephen has in-depth experience with sectors including housing, retail, leisure and financial services.
This well-rounded experience has fed into Assurestor's mission and approach. The business has garnered an enviable customer satisfaction record and technical delivery statistics, plus an upward trend, with the business on track to maintain the leading Zerto DRaaS partner in EMEA.
Computing: Please provide some background on Assurestor - what are you all about?
Operating for over a decade, Assurestor has grown its business exclusively focused on delivering cloud based services, safeguarding organisations with ultra-reliable disaster recovery and data backup services. Regardless of the nature of the disaster - fire, flood, restricted office access, missing data, ransomware, malware, etc - we provide a robust service that can quickly reinstate a customer's data and systems back to an operational position.
With a growing global presence, our disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and cloud-based data backup service are continually adapting to deliver sector-leading disaster recovery and business resilience services.
What makes you different from other companies?
Every aspect of the business is purely focused on business robustness and recovery; our services are not diluted by other non-essential distractions. Our product research, development, investment and training are all geared to ensuring our services will successfully deliver at the critical time they are required by a customer; there are no second chances.
We also adhere to a channel-only policy, so our partners are assured that they will not see Assurestor competing for the same business. This channel only approach allows us to fully immerse ourselves in opportunities and elevate proposals from our resellers.
What one company achievement in the last 12 months are you most proud of?
Our channel programme continues to grow in size and we now have an ever increasing number of global partners. Through this channel programme we have helped secure Zerto's largest DRaaS deal, spanning a world-wide deployment that will ultimately protect over 5,000 workloads.
This demonstrates the evolving acceptance within enterprises of the value of as-a-service platforms over traditional in-house deployed solutions to deliver both scalability, expertise and cost efficiencies to global organisations.
What are you working on this year?
The expansion of our international reach with new data centres in North America, new clients in the Middle East, and plans for additional sites to cover this region.
Our advanced portal leads the way in service provision and management, and further enhancements this year maintain its primacy.
Also, deployment of new technology integrated into the core of the cloud-backup and DRaaS services that identify malicious behaviour, such as the unexpected initiation of data encryption and malware payloads. This elevates our services to not just recovery but an additional layer of defence component in a multi-tiered security policy.
Why are events like the Cloud Excellence Awards important to the IT industry?
We all seek excellence and performance in our sector, where there are rarely second chances. The awards serve to highlight those partners and companies that are striving to achieve those goals. Recognition by industry peers can be extremely rewarding for a business and staff, but also an essential part of what we do in IT to build the best services possible. Being able to connect with partners, customers and even competitors face-to-face can be particularly worthwhile with the opportunity to recognise and congratulate successful peers in person.
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