The July 17th Telarus Tuesday call brought senior technology strategist, Ed Dryer to talk about Steadfast’s Cloud (public, private, hybrid), Back Up & Disaster Recovery, and Managed Security Services.

How is Steadfast Different?

Steadfast is a Chicago-based company that specializes in flexible cloud environments, infrastructure hosting, business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR), and a full suite of reliabl4e managed services and security. Steadfast was born at the beginning of the web; they were there before Amazon, Netflix, and eBay. They were hosting websites when they were nothing more than a few images and a lot of text, they have grown with the modern internet and are planning to keep that streak. Today, Steadfast prides itself on providing customers with high quality, flexible, and exceptionally reliable managed services with unparalleled support, at a great price. Providing consultation at all phases of service planning, design, and implementation, supported by 24/7/365 on-site engineers that manage and protect that service, Steadfast has become a natural extension of their customers’ IT resources.

So, how is Steadfast different?

• Independent – Privately owned, no equity investors
  • Nimble, flexible, and open to dynamic solutions
  • Fastest implementation times for leading-edge technologies – no bureaucracy
  • They own the network from the ISP to the server
• Nearly 3,000 customers with a 99% retention rate
  • Organic growth model
  • Net promoter score of 64
  • Average customer lifespan X years
  • Reduce the sales cycle by bringing engineers to discovery calls
  • Easy to work with
• Pioneered Cloud Technologies before most cloud providers even existed
  • One of the first to market with managed infrastructure

Three Big Steadfast Benefits

Steadfast is a partner, not a vendor. Whether a start-up or an enterprise organization, every customer has their attention.

1. They treat customers as individuals
   • Personalization from the initial discovery call
   • Custom designed infrastructure solutions included
   • On-going technical support and IT consulting
   • As much or little help as needed

They offer a 7.8-minute average support response because their success depends on their customer’s success.

2. They are obsessed with great support
   • Always available – 24/7/365
   • No call center – real, onsite, skilled engineers
   • No tiered support ticket prioritization
   • 30-minute response SLA – HALF the typical industry time

Steadfast doesn’t like surprise costs in their bills, so they don’t do it to their customer. They offer fixed billing models to avoid unplanned costs.

3. They help customers control costs
   • Competitive industry pricing
   • All support services include “No Add-Ons”
   • Control insights – remove unnecessary hidden costs
   • Avoid adding specialized staffing or consultants

Steadfast Simplicity Clouds

What is the cloud?  The cloud is the Internet, and it is everything from Amazon to Netflix, private companies, email, and Youtube. It’s all the cloud, some parts are publicly accessible, and some are not.  Steadfast specializes in how people connect to those different services reliably.

Steadfast Simplicity Clouds include a full spectrum of cloud service environments that include private, public and hybrid clouds, designed on a simple set of principles.

• Build a Better Cloud – Steadfast Simplicity Clouds are not blank-slate infrastructure platforms. To support organizations of all different sizes and users with varying levels of expertise, Steadfast offers personalized services and options to help customers build or deploy a cloud that fits their needs.
• Deliver Better Support – Steadfast prides itself on providing high quality, flexible, and exceptionally reliable managed services with unparalleled support that includes a support response SLA of 30 minutes or less (average of 7.4 minutes), for all customers without exception.
• Better Control of Costs – Steadfast Simplicity Clouds were designed to give you simple cloud solutions that fit your needs with the support to maximize performance, at prices that are up to 43 percent cheaper than comparable vendor cloud services.

Backup for IT Infrastructure & Disaster Recovery 

No matter what type of business you are running, you need to have an offsite cloud backup for your data, applications, and servers. You won’t find a more proactive approach to monitoring backup environments than what Steadfast offers. They make it simple and give you the peace of mind you need to run your business effectively by taking care of your offsite cloud backup.

• Custom designed to unique needs from small backups to enterprise redundancy
• Cost-effective bundles
• Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) solutions that allow access to on-site backup, off-site backup, and replication.
• Outstanding support staff 24/7/365
• Three SSAE18 and SOC2 Data Centers available for geo-redundancy
• Highly available and massively scalable

A disaster recovery plan includes detailed steps to quickly access cloud backups and replications to get your business back to normal operations as fast as possible. By utilizing Steadfast cloud-based disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS), you gain an immediately responsive environment that enables rapid turn up of backups and replications, as opposed to “backup-only” plans that require time to download all backups before you can restore. The Steadfast Disaster Recovery difference is:

• Service includes annual testing of your DR environment to verify that preparations are operating as expected BEFORE you need them
• Their reasonable prices are within reach for businesses of any size
• Their state-of-the-art data centers provide security, stability, and massive power, in addition to colocation and managed server hosting, Steadfast also provides managed network infrastructure both for collocated equipment and managed server hosting.

Managed Services

In addition to colocation and managed server hosting, Steadfast also provides managed network infrastructure both for collocated equipment and managed server hosting. Their Managed Services include:

• Network solutions – 24/7/365 support by Steadfast engineers as a part of their monthly cost
• Network Firewalls – Additional protections for servers and applications from threats on the Internet
• SSL VPN – Solutions can be engineered to enable clients to access data from any location or device
• Internet Load Balancing– Appliances for load balancing network traffic
• Custom managed switching and routing services
• Almost all network technologies a customer might need

Steadfast can also provide OpEx licensing for all managed solutions, so the customer doesn’t have to supply.

To learn more about Steadfast visit www.steadfast.net.