Red Road Networks is an IT managed services provider in New Mexico helping small businesses simplify IT in a way that both streamlines and strengthens their entire infrastructure. In addition to offering general managed services, Red Road Networks specializes in providing security and business continuity solutions to small businesses. Chris Porosky, CEO of Red Road Networks, and his small but mighty team of technicians manage hundreds of endpoints and provide exceptional IT services for their several dozen clients.
Red Road Networks has been a Ninja partner since 2016, using Ninja as their remote monitoring and management solution to support clients.
“Ninja’s backup policies give us a ton of control over what we backup, what we exclude, how much bandwidth we use, and how long we keep data which helps us balance our data protection needs with storage costs.”
Looking to make a change
In 2021, Chris and his team were looking for an alternative to their existing backup solution. “We had used N-able’s backup solution since before it was called GFI MaxBackup,” says Chris. “N-able’s price kept going up year after year, so we started to look for an alternative and came across Axcient. Axcient pitched us their direct-to-cloud product and offered us a great price, so we switched to them about a year ago. Unfortunately, Axcient was image-only which isn’t a great fit for workstations and overall the solution felt like it was still in Beta.”
“Our Ninja account manager reached out to us at the end of summer and let us know about Ninja’s new backup solution. Since it’s built into the Ninja console and the price made sense, we decided to trial the solution,” says Chris.
Why Red Road Networks chose Ninja Data Protection
Red Road Networks ultimately chose to go with Ninja’s backup solution as a replacement for Axcient because, “Ninja Data Protection seamlessly integrates with Ninja, so it’s really easy to setup and deploy. We can keep an eye on the status of all our endpoint backups and get alerts right in the RMM dashboard so we can resolve backup problems quickly,” Chris explained. “Not only that, Ninja’s backup policies give us a ton of control over what we backup, what we exclude, how much bandwidth we use, and how long we keep data which helps us balance our data protection needs with storage costs.”
Chris highlights two other reasons Ninja Data Protection was a good fit for his MSP business: “We like having the option to backup only files and folder – image backup isn’t generally a great fit for most workstations and laptops. With file backup, we can protect only the critical business data on an endpoint and save significantly on cloud storage costs. We also like that Ninja has cloud-only, local-only, and hybrid storage options. We don’t want to keep an appliance on site with customers, and cloud backup gets files off-site for added safety, so while we only use cloud backup today, we know we have the option to backup locally with Ninja when we want to.”
“We recently had a situation where a VP at one of our largest clients lost a PDF of some pretty important financial data. Fortunately, we have Ninja Data Protection on all end-user devices, so we had that file backed up. I quickly jumped into the file restore prompt in Ninja, found the file, and restored it directly to his endpoint. I didn’t have to mount an image in the cloud, find the file, download it, and email it like you do with some backup solutions. This is sensitive data, so it’s great that I can just restore it directly to his endpoint without ever storing the file locally,” says Chris.
Selling backup to customers
“With file backup, we can protect only the critical business data on an endpoint and save significantly on cloud storage costs”
Alongside the switch to Ninja, Chris decided to update Red Road Network’s pricing structure to align with other MSPs in the area as it had been several years since they had increased prices. For many of Red Road’s customers, this meant a 20 – 30% increase in service costs. “One of the ways we made it more palatable to customers,” says Chris, “is to tell all our customers that we were rolling backup into all their plans. ‘As part of our managed services, we’re going to protect the critical data on all your workstations.’ We were a bit surprised, but no one pushed back. The extra value added by data protection made the price increase a really easy conversation with our customers.”
Going forward, Chris is excited to add server backup to his list of services with Ninja Data Protection’s new image backup capabilities. “Now that image backup is out of Beta, we’re going to test it out and see how we can leverage Ninja Data Protection for servers and possibly use image backup on critical workstations as well.”
