“Knowing how easy it was, we should have done it sooner."

Contrast Technologies is a Canterbury-based managed IT support (MSP) provider focused on helping schools with their tech needs. They’re a one-stop shop for all of a school’s IT requirements.

Part of their service involves taking ownership of a school’s tech infrastructure and managing it to make it better, reliable and more user friendly. This is where Couchdrop comes in.

“We manage quite a lot of servers, firewalls and network infrastructure, and within that, there seems to be a lot of legacy protocols that don’t change,” says Contrast director Scott Simpson.

“For example, a firewall might have a very limited way of taking backups of its configuration that’s very old fashioned. So while technology has moved on, all these vendors support these legacy ways of transferring files.

“We wanted to seamlessly automate the backup and storing of these config files, but we couldn't because we had to work with these legacy protocols. Jobs took longer, there were compliance issues, and it was just clunky.”

Doing something about it was one of those jobs always on the backburner. It went in the too hard basket – something the Contrast team wanted to get around to one day.

Until the day they reached out to Couchdrop. Contrast went from muddling through with these legacy systems to having Couchdrop’s seamless file transfer system up and running within a matter of hours.

“It just worked – it did what it said it would do on the tin. The first thing you see on the Couchdrop website is, ʻSFTP was never made for the Cloud' and they’re absolutely right. They fixed that problem for us, and knowing how easy it was, we should have done it sooner.

“The beauty of it is it blends old world tech with new world tech. We can integrate and talk to legacy protocols but in the back end we’re using the newest tech around file storage. Having that blend is really unheard of.”

As well as making processes simpler, Couchdrop allows Contrast to have peace of mind over its file backups, and know that if things go wrong in a data attack or with human error, they’ve got a ready-made solution that takes very little effort to implement.

“You might scoff and say, ‘All you're doing is backing up config files,’ but how we respond to things going wrong is how we’re going to be measured. It’s about how quickly we can fix things and return back to where we were. If we can’t do it quickly, it’ll bite us in the backside.

“But with Couchdrop, we’ve got confidence in the solution we’ve put in place and that the backed-up files are at ready for use at our fingertips.”