ISP Glide Student & Residential in UK in Partnership with virtualDCS

Business and residential ISP, Glide Student & Residential Ltd (Glide Group), is adding the UK’s most advanced backup and recoverability service for Microsoft 365 to its thriving product range, after forming a new partnership with Virtual Data Centre Services Limited (virtualDCS).

As part of the agreement, Glide is offering virtualDCS’s CloudCover 365 and Veeam Cloud Connect solutions to its commercial customers, ranging from micro-businesses and SMEs to large corporates, alongside its fast, full-fibre broadband services.

CloudCover 365 is a Veeam powered self-service Microsoft 365 backup portal, meaning individual end users can view and restore their own data, without the support of IT specialists. The product backups all aspects of Microsoft 365, including email, contacts, public folders, Teams, documents in One Drive and the Intranet service, SharePoint.

Cloud Connect offers an off-site backup solution to protect virtual, physical and cloud-based workloads without the cost or complexity of building and maintaining a secondary off-site infrastructure. The product provides an integrated, secure way to transfer customer backups to the cloud, whilst retaining full control and visibility of the information. The solution also provides the additional benefit of air-gapped data protection, in the event of a ransomware attack.

Glide will officially unveil the partnership and products at Connected North, the dedicated digital economy event, on the April 17-18 in Manchester, UK.

Glide is the 7^th largest ISP in the UK and manages some of the country’s largest WiFi networks, with more than 100,000 access points and a 500GB core network. The company’s fibre networks link most UK cities including London, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Edinburgh. Video game digital distribution service, Steam, recently named Glide as the fastest ISP in the UK in terms of average download speeds. In addition to the UK, the company is also expanding across Ireland, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria and The Netherlands.

Glide has already spent 2 years using Veeam Cloud Connect for its own in-house backup.

Harbans Rall, head of product, Glide, said: “After experiencing first-hand the quality of virtualDCS‘s products and customer service levels, this is an exciting opportunity to further enhance the range of services that we offer our customers. We regularly speak to our customers to understand their needs and act as a trusted advisor to many of them, especially the smaller SMEs and micro-businesses that don‘t have their own IT teams. We know Microsoft 365 is the go-to product for most businesses, but many are unaware that although Microsoft host 365 data, it‘s the end users that are responsible for protecting it. CloudCover 365 offers a cost-effective and easy to use solution to this problem and, along with Veeam Cloud Connect, it will complement the existing broadband, security and voice communication products and services that we already offer. We‘re really looking forward to highlighting the benefits of these products at Connected North in April.“

Richard May, MD, virtualDCS, added: “The fact that Glide has taken the decision to sell our products to their customers, after gaining a first-hand understanding of their market-leading features over the past two years, is a superb endorsement for what we do. It also further endorses our decision in 2021 to solely focus on providing infrastructure, backup and DR services, with UK data sovereignty, to IT partners that want to offer cloud-based backup services to their clients and end-users. We‘re very excited to launch this partnership with Glide and we‘re already talking to them about expanding the offering with further products in the near future.“

virtualDCS recently became the first UK owned channel first Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) to be named as a platinum service provider by Veeam. This followed the company also becoming the first UK-based VCSP partner to achieve the Reseller Ready competency from Veeam, which gives virtualDCS an official seal of approval to resell Veeam’s entire product portfolio to its own partners including BaaS, Veeam Backup for Office 365, DRaaS, off-site backup and MSP backup.