Nationwide business and residential ISP Glide Group is adding advanced backup and recoverability service for Microsoft 365 to its product range in partnership with Leeds’ virtualDCS.
As part of the agreement, Glide now offers virtualDCS’s CloudCover 365 and Veeam Cloud Connect solutions to its commercial customers, ranging from micro-businesses and SMEs to large corporates, alongside its ultra-fast, full-fibre broadband services.
CloudCover 365 is a world leading Veeam powered, self-service Microsoft 365 backup portal, meaning individual end users can quickly and easily view and restore their own data, without the support of IT specialists. The product fully backs up all aspects of Microsoft 365, including email, contacts, public folders, Teams, documents in One Drive and the intranet service, SharePoint.
Veeam Cloud Connect offers an off-site backup solution to protect virtual, physical and cloud-based workloads without the cost or complexity of building and maintaining a secondary off-site infrastructure. The product provides a fully integrated, secure and seamless way to transfer customer backups to the cloud, whilst retaining full control and visibility of the information. The solution also provides the additional benefit of air-gapped data protection, which is crucial in the event of a Ransomware attack.
Glide is now the seventh largest ISP in the UK and manages some of the country’s largest WiFi networks, with more than 100,000 access points and a 500GB core network linking most UK cities.
Video game digital distribution service, Steam, recently named Glide as the fastest ISP in the UK in terms of average download speeds. In addition to the UK, the company is also expanding across Ireland, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria and The Netherlands. Glide has already spent two years using Veeam Cloud Connect for its in-house backup.
Harbans Rall, head of product at Glide, said: “After experiencing first-hand the quality of virtualDCS’s products and customer service levels, this is an exciting opportunity to further enhance the range of services that we offer our customers.
“We know Microsoft 365 is the go-to product for most businesses, but many are unaware that although Microsoft hosts 365 data, it’s the end users that are responsible for protecting it. CloudCover 365 offers a cost-effective and easy to use solution to this problem and, along with Veeam Cloud Connect, it will complement the existing broadband, security and voice communication products and services that we already offer.”
Richard May, managing director of virtualDCS, added: “The fact that Glide has taken the decision to sell our products to their customers, after gaining a first-hand understanding of their market-leading features over the past two years, is a superb endorsement for what we do. It also further endorses our decision in 2021 to solely focus on providing infrastructure, backup and disaster recovery services, with UK data sovereignty, to IT partners that want to offer cloud-based backup services to their clients and end-users.”
Leeds-based virtualDCS recently became the first UK-owned, channel first Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) to be named as a platinum service provider by Veeam. This followed virtualDCS also becoming the first UK-based VCSP partner to achieve the Reseller Ready competency from Veeam, which gives virtualDCS an official seal of approval to resell Veeam’s entire product portfolio to its own partners including BaaS (Backup as a Service), Veeam Backup for Office 365, DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service), off-site backup and MSP (Managed Service Provider) backup.
