Creative Zone skips VEEAM to enjoy user-friendly Microsoft 365 backups with Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud

Creative Zone is one of the UAE’s largest business setup advisory firms and has assisted over 75,000 entrepreneurs with their business journey in the region. Providing services to businesses of all sectors, the company helps organizations in all aspects of business setup, pre-setup, post-setup, software licensing, backend services and after-sales support. Creative Zone leverages over a decade of experience helping businesses identify the best fit solutions in the market. The company helps clients by not only curating well-suited solutions, but also implementing products in strategic ways to extract benefits for their business. Additionally, the team at Creative Zone understands the prospectus of security and strategizes measures to improve security standards for their clients.

Despite an extensive vendor list, Creative Zone was in the market for a solution to back up their clients’ Microsoft 365 data. Sajid Ebrahim, IT Manager at Creative Zone, participated in multiple free trials and seminars from the top backup solution vendors in the region. From his research, Ebrahim stated, “I had tried Veeam. The first thing that I noticed was that Veeam was not so userfriendly, to be frank. It’s a bit more complicated, including the user interface.” For Ebrahim and Creative Zone, ease of use and reliability were the two most important requirements of the new backup solution. Both qualities were vital to driving growth and success for the business to seamlessly set up, manage and perform Microsoft 365 backups for clients.

In terms of Microsoft 365 backups, it was integral that the solution didn’t require specialized security talent to use it. The solution interface had to be user friendly, so that any one of Creative Zone’s staff could potentially perform backups. The company couldn’t afford to lose time, resources and productivity dealing with a complex solution, making it pivotal that it had an intuitive, simple console.

After exploring multiple vendors, Creative Zone started a free trial of Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud and enjoyed the user-friendly interface. What intrigued Ebrahim most was his experience with the free trial. The trial gave him the opportunity to experiment with the solution firsthand and enabled him to perform backups in other environments, including virtual machines, servers and Hyper-V. Ebrahim strategized several use cases for the solution such as predicting the time it takes to return machines to normal operations and creating disaster recovery per those timelines with greater accuracy. The trial also gave him the freedom to play with features and gain a complete understanding of the solution’s potential — without commitment. Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud piqued Ebrahim’s interest and he went on to attend a two-day training session and earned certification as an Acronis accredited backup engineer.

Thrilled with the trial, Creative Zone reached out to Fixit Computer Technologies, and both companies determined Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud was the ideal solution. Creative Zone was elated by its simplicity and reliability and reported 140 clients now use Acronis to back up their M365 environments.

Creative Zone has been using Acronis for the past few months and anticipates seeing measurable business results in the near future. However, Ebrahim was delighted to share his success story of using Acronis backup at a previous company over several years. He recalled a former client whose physical server was infected with ransomware. According to Ebrahim, “In the previous company, it really helped me. I had a situation when the physical server was hit with ransomware and luckily, we had the backup, and were able to restore it. It was a big saver for me.” Ebrahim was able to successfully recover the client’s critical data from backups and saw time-saving benefits with Acronis.

From his extensive experience with backup and restore, he was well attuned to the expected length of time it took to replicate data and return the client back to normal operations. Ebrahim felt confident Acronis would meet his expectations again and recommended the solution to Creative Zone.

Creative Zone uses Acronis Microsoft 365 backup as a backdrop to drive security awareness, educate clients and start valuable discussions. Ebrahim shared that several of his clients lack a fundamental understanding of backups and email security. With Acronis, he feels confident in educating clients on the importance of data protection.

Alongside Microsoft 365 backups, Creative Zone is also taking advantage of Advanced Management for Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud, enabling the patch management and remote desktop support functionalities to enhance their services to clients. Ebrahim reports that Acronis’ remote desktop assistance is far more secure than using a remote desktop freeware tool. He looks forward to exploring each of the Advanced Management features in the future.