This year OzHosting.com is celebrating its 20th anniversary of providing cloud hosting solutions on the Australian market. Established in 1997, it’s one of the original web hosting companies in Australia that made web hosting services easy and affordable for Australian businesses and organizations.
Doug Endersbee, OzHosting.com CEO, told Acronis that understanding the market and responding to customers’ changing needs have been critical to the company’s success over the last two decades. Mr. Endersbee also explained why OzHosting.com selected Acronis Backup Cloud as their new Backup-as-a-Service platform and what has been achieved in the first four months since the system was deployed.
Where did it all start, and what services does OzHosting.com provide?
OzHosting.com has been around since 1997 — it’s one of the original hosting companies in Australia. We are very much a pure breed hosting company providing your typical hosting services that most small businesses require. This includes domain registration, websites, email, security, and backup services. We also provide virtual machines and server management services as required.
Where are you located?
We are operating from Metronode, a local Tier-3 datacenter in Silverwater, Sydney, Australia. The facility is anchor-tenanted by New South Wales Government and being there is part of our strategy to provide localized cloud services.
Is it where you’ve always been?
No, initially we used a different datacenter in North Ryde. Metronode is quite new. When we heard about it and when we learned that NSW Government mandated all their off-premises services to be located there, we decided it was the right time to move.
You’re obviously providing cloud services to government organizations?
Yes, we do a small amount of services for the government. But most of our customers are traditional Australian small and family businesses: law firms, accounting practices, builders, management consultancies and so on. They enjoy knowing that their data is located in the same datacenter where the government hosts their services. It gives them extra peace of mind.
What services are hot right now?
Right now, the most important thing for businesses in Australia is data security, backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity. We’re aware that globally, cyber-crime has exceeded drug cartels in terms of cost to the community. Since we’re so close to small businesses in Australia, we hear a lot about incredibly disruptive experiences they have when dealing with malware or being held up by ransomware. It’s really hurting them.
We have a big job ahead of us educating the public and working with small businesses to make sure they have some level of protection from malware and cybercrime.
OzHosting.com deployed Acronis Backup Cloud only four months ago. Is it too early to ask how it is going?
No, not at all! It’s going really well! A lot of our customers are system integrators — they are the guys who support small businesses, making sure that their networks are operational and their data is protected. Even though it takes a while for a new technology to filter through to the end users, we’ve had some early wins. One of these service integrators looks after more than 20 medical centers in and around Sydney and he is now moving most of them to our new Acronis-powered backup platform. We’ve provided him with secure data seeding capability (because most of these centers have a pretty ordinary network connection) and it’s really helping him to expedite the speed with which he rolls out the new technology.
Up until now, all they had was an on-premises backup solution and every night somebody had the task to physically unplug the external backup hard drive and take it home with them. It’s a very risky exercise because if the hard drive is compromised or incorrectly dismounted and everything gets lost on-premises that day, they would have a lot of difficulties restoring data.
These companies feel relieved to have a cloud backup with OzHosting.com — with multiple restore points and secure storage in a local datacenter.
Where do you store your customers’ backup data?
We’ve deployed the Acronis Backup Cloud platform in our own datacenter in order to have the ability to control what happens with the data and also to be able to expand when we need to. Storing the data locally is very important. Many customers have a very poor internet connection and they can’t actually use their network to run the initial backups. Their bandwidth is sufficient for the incremental backups, but when they have a few hundred gigabytes of data and all they have is an ADSL connection, being able to give us a hard drive with all this data for the initial seeding makes the deal.
Have your sales increased since you started offering this solution?
Yes, definitely. Our cloud backup sales are growing between 10-15 percent month on month and we can really see some great potential in that. As the word gets out, this percentage rate will increase and it will only get stronger.
Acronis hybrid cloud architecture allows us to keep backup data in Australia, in our own datacenter. And the fact that the platform supports initial backup seeding and data encryption on the device — these things mean a lot to our customers, especially those who deal with personal data and are required to store it within Australian borders.
Where do you see the market is moving to in Australia?
Australian businesses and organizations are embracing the cloud’s unlimited storage capacity and computing power. There are many vendors who can give you storage — Microsoft Azure, Softlayer, Amazon — but the reality is, you still need a backup solution. I think most people don’t want to run their own backup platforms. They want to come to somebody like OzHosting.com, who already have everything set up, and access the latest backup solution for a small monthly fee. Our technical support is also available to them: we can log in remotely and set up their new servers, VMs, Hyper-V… whatever they’re attempting to backup.
As the market becomes more in tune with backup requirements and more exposed to the catastrophic effects of data loss, the cloud backup market will grow very quickly. Acronis, with its product set and advanced data protection capabilities, is going to soak up a lot of the growth that is going to happen in this market space.
Thank you, Mr. Endersbee, for choosing Acronis Backup Cloud to power OzHosting.com’s backup service, and for giving us this insightful interview. We at Acronis are excited for your success!
To learn more about Acronis Backup Cloud and how it can help your business, visit http://go.acronis.com/backup-cloud.
About Acronis
A Swiss company founded in Singapore in 2003, Acronis has 15 offices worldwide and employees in 50+ countries. Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud is available in 26 languages in 150 countries and is used by over 20,000 service providers to protect over 750,000 businesses.
