In addition to on-premise and cloud-based data protection solutions, i365 offers a higher-touch data backup and recovery managed service for companies who don’t have the time or resources to do it themselves. The i365 Blog recently sat down with Deirdre Finnegan, a Project Manager on i365’s EVault Managed Services team, to get a view from the trenches on how she is helping her customers meet their data protection requirements.
Q. What is your role at i365?
A. As a Project Manager for our managed services organization, I am the primary liaison between the customer and our internal teams. I am responsible for planning and coordinating each of our new EVault Managed Services customers through the project lifecycle: from post sales, design, and implementation to on-going management all the way through the life of the contract.
Q. How does initial set up work?
A. When someone decides to become an EVault Managed Services customer, they can expect to move through the following four phases of our streamlined project management process:
- Post sales kick-off
- Design
- Implementation
- Ongoing management
Once sales finishes working with the customer on the contract and the deal is closed, the customer is introduced to his or her Project Manager. We engage the customer on the kick-off call, which usually consists of the Account Rep and myself from i365. On the customer side it tends to be the CIO or CTO and the technical person who will be our primary contact. On this call we go over the contract, review their environment at a high level and set the client’s expectations.
The next phase is Design. When we move to the physical design phase we make sure that there are no surprises for the customer. On the Design call the i365 Professional Services Consultant reviews the customer environment with the customer. We make sure that we fully understand the customer’s IT infrastructure and requirements including the hardware and software environment, regulatory compliance requirements, security/risk tolerance, geographic locations, and deployment architecture. We also walk them through our implementation approach.
The objective of the Design phase is to make certain that everything is in line for the consultant to arrive onsite and begin installation and configuration of the EVault data protection solution for the Implementation Phase. We provide hands-on training for how to most effectively and efficiently work with the Agent, the component of our solution that is installed on systems requiring protection. In essence, our Managed Services Team provides guidance to customers to realize the best ongoing management of their backups.
At the completion of the implementation we have a call to transition management of the vault to the dedicated i365 Vault Manager. The vault is the component of our solution that holds and manages the backup data. We walk the customer through the Ongoing Management process and any processes that they need to know surrounding disaster recovery restores, testing, and DR declarations. We consider this the Ongoing Management Phase of the project lifecycle. At this point the dedicated i365 Vault Manager becomes the primary contact for our customer, and I become the primary contact for any issues that are not directly related to the health of the vault. Moving forward I leave all technical project management to the experts and I assist the customer with any business, development, escalations or opportunities.
Q. How long does it take you to get a customer deployed?
A. The average implementation lifecycle takes about 4-5 weeks
Q. What are some of the benefits of a customer using EVault Managed Services as opposed to doing everything in house?
A. The number one benefit is the peace of mind that our customers receive via our dedicated resources. They have a dedicated vault, a dedicated Project Manager, and a dedicated i365 Vault Manager. Managed Services customers are, for the most part, the largest and most complex i365 customers. Tropical Financial Credit Union and Sienna Health Ventures, to name a few, are Managed Services customers that understand the value of right-sourcing (as opposed to the negatively connoted “outsourcing”) a DR and backup operation to the industry experts. The Managed Services team truly partners with customers, thus, we become an extension of a customer’s IT department. This level of trust comes with a pro-active, can-do attitude and “customer success first” approach which is standard with i365 EVault Managed Services.
Another benefit is our “pay as you grow” model – customers can start as small as they like, grow as much as they need, and then scale back if that is what makes sense for their business.
Q. What size company do most of your customers come from?
A. Our average customer comes from a company with approximately 500 employees, distributed environments (i.e.: departments), and multiple platforms: UNIX, Windows, iSeries, Solaris, Oracle, etc.
Q. What can customers expect if they utilize i365 EVault Managed Services?
A. Customers can expect a full service back end data protection and recovery management solution. Customers often tell me that they love the service, and one of the reasons is that the dedicated i365 Vault mManagers are some of the best of the business. They really care about our customers and making them successful.
Q. What is your favorite thing about your job?
A. My favorite thing is there are no two customers that are the same. While we do have a process that we follow; every environment, every customer, is different. Every one of our implementations is a customized solution to best fit that customer’s environment and I love the challenge of making each and every customer successful no matter how diverse their environment is.
Q. Tell us about something you have done recently to help a customer that you are most proud of.
A. We had an EVault SaaS customer decide they wanted to move to our EVault Managed Services offering. This customer had approximately 2,000 laptops spread across six of our vaults. The customer’s existing IT environment is decentralized and we wanted to help them manage their backups in a more centralized manner. Our Managed Services offering did just that for them. With the help of our internal teams, I created a customized process to touch each of these users in their decentralized environment so we could update and migrate them to their new dedicated Managed Services vault. The customer was very pleased and I was glad we could help them.
Posted on behalf of Deirdre Finnegan
