Michael Thompson, Co-Founder & VP Sales & Strategy In 2013, Michael Thompson and David McPeak, Co-founders of Sky Data Vault, LLC recognized that although Fortune 500 businesses were able to address their protection and recovery needs, SMB to Mid Market Businesses and the Non Profit community were lacking a simple and easy to manage DRaaS service. “While having a disaster recovery plan is necessary in today’s environments, many of these organization were struggling with a better way to keep their data safe and secure,” states Thompson, VP Sales and Strategy. He wanted to provide his clients with cloud backup and disaster recovery services that can allow for business continuity—no matter what the interruption. His strategy was to simplify the procurement, management, and support of the service for customers. Making disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) more accessible to organizations led to the formation of Sky Data Vault (SDV).
The Maryland-based company addresses clients’ data protection and recovery strategies through its comprehensive portfolio of disaster recovery services. The SDV portfolio is offered on a monthly subscription basis and encompasses three services levels: Direct to Cloud (D2C) Back Up; Hybrid DRaaS; and Direct to Cloud (D2C) DRaaS.
The D2C Back Up is the most cost-effective protection and recovery service. SDV installs the SDV Agent on a client’s system, and the SDV software encrypts the files and folder backups. The software then sends the data to SDV, where it is securely stored in the SDV Cloud.
Moving to full system protection and virtualization, the firm’s Hybrid and D2C DRaaS service levels protect and can virtualize the entire environment, including files and folders, operating systems, applications, and databases in a matter of minutes. Hybrid DRaaS offers an on-site appliance as a recovery and virtualization point as well as a synchronized cloud recovery and virtualization point.
Keeping with the theme of full virtualization in minutes, but built for clients who have production environments in an on-site data center, off-site data center, or even in a public cloud, the Sky Data Vault D2C DRaaS is an ideal option. The service eliminates the need for a local appliance, but still provides the same recovery and virtualization options in the secure SDV Cloud.
Since its inception, the company has nearly doubled in revenue each year by continuously providing a unique value to its clients by improving productivity and efficiency in their business. SDV continually monitors, manages, and maintains clients’ protection and recovery strategies and provides them with the appropriate disaster recovery services. In most cases, these clients look to SDV to as an augmented workforce, where SDV shoulders the responsibility of protection and recovery services, allowing the business to focus on its core mission.
With this wide range of clients, requirements can run the gamut. As such, SDV is highly adaptive. In a recent engagement, a large non-profit organization based in the Washington, DC area performed a security audit and discovered that its existing protection recovery plan failed to satisfy its security requirements. After the initial meeting, SDV analysed the loopholes in the client’s current strategy and proposed a comprehensive and easy to deploy solution that brought them into compliance. By leveraging SDV’s service portfolio and monthly subscription pricing model, the organization was fully protected within days of signing an agreement—making the implementation process easy on the organization’s staff and getting the organization into compliance in record time.
“This demonstrates the need for all organizations to understand the best practice of reviewing and testing their protection and recovery strategy on a consistent basis,” stresses Thompson. “Whenever we engage with a client, we always highlight the importance of testing. In many cases, we speak with folks that have not tested their service in the last 12 months and in some cases never have,” Thompson continues.
Sky Data Vault builds its client base by leveraging its extensive MSP and Agent partner community. In 2017, SDV was added as a Preferred Provider of The Alliance Partners, the largest consortium of IT, Telecom, and Cloud Technology distributors in the US. In addition, SDV won the 2017 Best in Class – Cloud Compute Award and the 2017 Best in Show Award for the inaugural Alliance Partner Tech+Connect Event. This has continued to pave the way for SDV to grow its business on a nationwide scale.
