On-Prem, In Control: The Infrastructure Shift Toward Data Sovereignty

[00:00:00] Welcome back, but today I'm excited to unveil the Tech Talks Network. It's a collection of my shows designed to explore every corner of enterprise technology and the impact that it is having on our life, work and even world. So, the Tech Talks Network consists of eight podcasts. So please check out techtalksnetwork.com. You'll find links to everything that you need right there.

[00:00:25] But back to this show, today I've got a great guest lined up for you. Thomas is going to take me on a journey behind the scenes of CloudTility, a self-service multi-talent platform that is purpose-built for managing data protection and object storage across a mix of vendors and infrastructure.

[00:00:46] So whether you are an MSP looking to scale efficiently or an enterprise IT department operating more like an internal service provider, CloudTility is tackling complexity with automation, transparency and flexibility. Most importantly though, without compromising on sovereignty or control. So I want to learn more about how CloudTility is enabling fine-grained hierarchy and role-based workflows.

[00:01:16] Why on-premise remains critical for many organisations right now. And how white labelling and billing automation are powering growth for service providers. But before we get started, huge thank you to Philippe and Celine for hosting such an exceptional IT press tour and for looking after us and for looking after not only myself but 15 other tech journalists so well.

[00:01:41] I think they've created something truly special here that bridges meaningful conversations, especially around technology that really matters. So check those out at IT press tour dot net. Big thank you to both of them. But today I'm here to talk to Thomas back CEO of our wow. So enough scene setting for me. Let's get him on the podcast now. So a massive thank you for joining me on the podcast today.

[00:02:11] Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do? Yeah, sure Neil. Thanks for having me today. And my name is Thomas back and I'm the CEO of the company our wow. We develop and provide the software solution cloudility to managed service providers popular called MSPs and enterprise clients. And then on the more personal side, I'm a father of three kids and together with my wife, we have five kids in total. And not to forget Molly, our five months old talk.

[00:02:39] So a lovely and lively life, both work wise and private educational wise. I hold a master degree in computer science and the business administration. And on the side, I'm a volunteer chairman of the board of one of our local gymnastics clubs. Wow. I feel quite inadequate now talking to you because not only do you spin a lot of plates that are incredibly busy family man and not to mention you somewhat of a tech leader.

[00:03:06] I can testament to your gymnastic capabilities. Having seen you do a presentation at the IT press tour, which you concluded with a handstand, no, no, no, no, no, which I think my days of doing that are long gone. So something you're very passionate about, right? Oh, definitely, definitely very passionate. And, you know, I have ended a few sessions in my life stating that we are willing to do handstands and flips for you to make our customers happy. And then I do a flip or do a handstand on stage. So, yeah.

[00:03:36] I love it. And if we just go back in time a moment, can you tell me about the very beginning of the journey that you've been on here and what inspired you to ultimately leave a successful MSP and how that mission has evolved since I think it was something like 2016. Is that right? That's true. But yeah, you're right. Actually, I think we should go all the way back to the year 2006.

[00:04:01] I was working as a channel manager for a service provider which delivered data protection services. And I found that a lot of my time was spent, you know, more or less on as an order taker, handling a lot of practical stuff in the process of setting up new channel partners and their end customers.

[00:04:21] So, with my educational background and then the, you know, practical challenges that I saw in my job for myself and most of the channel partners I worked with, an idea kind of took form.

[00:04:34] So, I sat down at my home, in my home and I architectured a web-based software solution which would empower our channel partners and their end customers with, you know, a multi-tenant self-service portal solution that would sit on top of enterprise-class data protection technology. At the time, that was IBM Tivoli Storage Manager. TSM is now called IBM Storage Protect.

[00:04:59] So, you know, to be able to kind of have the order-taking part of the solution, you know, given out as self-services rather than me being that order taker. So, I talked to management of the company I worked for about this idea, you know, but they were not really ready and prepared to invest. And also, they mentioned that things were going rather well, which was true, you know.

[00:05:25] So, I actually quit my job and together with two partners, I co-founded an MSP business with a vision of bringing IBM Storage Protect or enterprise-class data protection to market as a service to small and mid-sized companies and, of course, also the large enterprises. But, you know, the idea here would actually take IBM Storage Protect into markets where they didn't have a footprint before this, the small and mid-sized companies.

[00:05:52] The business here, the MSP business that I co-founded actually became very successful and was finally acquired in 2016. The buyer of the company did not have and did not want software and software development in-house. So, in agreement with them, we created a new company, Awao, which took over the IT and ownership of the portal solution. Kind of lucky for me because that was my baby.

[00:06:17] A license agreement was formed between Awao and the MSP company and this was kind of the start of the new adventure, Awao. And since 2016, we have done a lot of work to make CloudTility, you know, the perfect tool for any type of MSP and any type of enterprise. Our different customers, you know, they do things differently.

[00:06:38] And hence, we have developed CloudTility with lots of settings, which allows our customers, the MSPs and enterprises to set up processes and automation aligned with the way that they run their businesses. Additionally, we have expanded our family of supported technologies in CloudTility. Neil, I mentioned IBM Storage Protect and that's where we started.

[00:07:00] But now CloudTility additionally supports data protection technologies such as Rubrik, Cohesity and the new one, IBM Storage Defender Data Protect, as well as a couple of S3 object storage technologies. One is Point Archive Gateway and the other one is IBM COS, stands for IBM Cloud Object Storage.

[00:07:19] So, I think that's really, that's the story and the background of, you know, coming from the MSP space and moving into, you know, an independent software vendor and software in general. What a great story. And fast forward to 2025, Awao and its multi-level data protection services have seen you position CloudTility as an almost backup as a service solution.

[00:07:46] But for anybody listening, hearing about you guys for the first time, what would be those biggest pain points for IT teams that you set out to solve and are indeed solving today? I hope your listeners has a lot of time, Neil. I will start correcting you and I will say that we do position CloudTility as an enabler for backup service and also an enabler for S3 object storage as a service.

[00:08:13] And the primary pain points, which are solved by CloudTility, it really depends on the use case. But, you know, let me give it a shot. First of all, single point of control. That's for those of our customers, you know, who has multi-vendor strategies or simply have multiple technologies in place because of acquisitions they do.

[00:08:33] CloudTility will help, you know, with a unified, with unifying processes and reporting and self-service across the different vendors as a single point of control or you might say a single pane of glass. Next, we know for sure that MSPs often struggle with multi-tenancy, how to segregate their different customers, partners, resellers, departments of customers and more business units.

[00:08:59] And at the same time, consolidating their data and consumption in a centralized and shared infrastructure. The very backbone of CloudTility is a very flexible and secure multi-tenant model that will allow to create a tree structure of tenants, you know, business units with as many side-by-side tenants and as many descendant layers as needed.

[00:09:20] So in CloudTility, it's not a problem to reflect the infrastructure of a global company that has a presence in multiple countries where they have multiple departments with multiple server groups, you know, etc. In the same way, CloudTility is capable of reflecting a partner and reseller strategy of an MSP.

[00:09:39] You know, the MSP can create all of their partners who can now log in and deliver backup and SV object storage to their customers in their own names and brands. What else do we solve? I would say we solve the challenge of self-service, and that is a challenge at each tenant. So it's all kind of tied into this multi-tenancy backbone.

[00:10:02] So at all tenants in CloudTility, you can add one or more role-based end users and departmental users who can now access self-service provisioning and many other self-service features, really. They can get access to reports and monitoring, consumption numbers, and much more. And finally, I have to mention billing automation.

[00:10:23] You would be surprised, Neil, how many, and of course, you're probably not too surprised because you speak to a lot of people, but I'm surprised how many MSPs and enterprises who struggle with getting the right numbers for their billing purpose or for showback of cost in an enterprise. They're often depending on complex and error-prone Excel spreadsheets and other homebrew scripts and solutions. In CloudTility, we have a built-in consumption-based recurring billing automation engine.

[00:10:53] The billing tool allows you to create one or more subscriptions with pricing metrics that matches the commercial terms of the customer contracts. And now for each of the debitors, you can create a contract and activate one or more of the subscriptions you have for the set customer.

[00:11:12] CloudTility will now generate a monthly CSV or JSON billing file, which is nicely organized with possibly thousands, 10,000s of billing lines, including all the information that's needed to create the actual invoices for each of the debitors or tenants, if you will.

[00:11:31] And by the way, I mentioned here CSV and JSON as the file output of the billing data, but CloudTility is built with an API-first approach so that everything which is possible via the CloudTility user interface can be done via the API. So the API approach allows our customers to integrate any of CloudTility data and functionality with other systems and applications that they have in usage.

[00:11:57] And I was just thinking about this because we were talking about billing. So, of course, the JSON and CSV file, they are great. But if you really want to take the automation to the greatest extent, then, of course, our customers will get the data for the billing from the APIs in CloudTility. I think that was kind of some of the value points that you will find in CloudTility.

[00:12:25] And you mentioned multi-tenancy there, and that's something that seems to be at the very core of CloudTility. So how does your – I mean, just to drill a little bit deeper into some of what we're talking about here – how does your flexible role-based hierarchy help MSPs and business leaders listening and their enterprises better manage their data protection workflows? Anything you can solve around this? Because, again, huge pain point. It is a huge pain point.

[00:12:53] And it's becoming relevant in so many use cases. But, you know, I already spoke about the multi-tenancy CloudTility as being a very flexible model that allows for as many side-by-side and descendant business units as needed and as required.

[00:13:12] This really ensures that all backups and buckets belonging to a specific customer can easily be assigned to the said customer, either manually in a few easy steps, or Foutility allows to set up auto-assignment of backups and buckets to the business units in the business unit hierarchy where they belong. So once everything is assigned, the end customers can help themselves to creating, activating, and scheduling their own backups and do self-provisioning of own buckets.

[00:13:42] And these, of course, are created at the right business unit immediately because that's where the end user is logged in. So CloudTility also have, like, different processes built in. An important one is a deletion process which allows some users to request deletion of backups. Now, other users have access to approving the deletion or maybe denying it. And finally, the data is deleted on a specific date.

[00:14:08] All of these steps are documented so that if a customer calls in six months after a deletion to get their data back, then a search for the data in CloudTility for that specific data that the customer is asking about. And that search will lead to a report stating that a person requested deletion on, you know, the 4th of May. This was approved by another user, the 15th of May, and then the data was deleted two weeks after on the 1st of June. And that's just an example.

[00:14:37] Documentation and proof of who asked for what and who did what is extremely important. And CloudTility has, you know, a built-in activity log which kind of locks all committing actions in CloudTility. And having all of that structured in a nicely structured multi-tenant hierarchy really is a game changer here.

[00:15:02] And from the outside looking in, one of the standout things for me is all about integration. So, again, for people listening, how do your integrations with IBM Storage Protect, Rubrik, Cohesity and Point Archival Gateway, how do these work in practice? And ultimately, what advantages does this give customers looking for more unified control? Again, again, Neil, I can give responses in different directions here.

[00:15:32] But let me start by saying the integration is plug and play. We have done tight integrations with the solutions that we do support. That means that all the work has been done up front. So, the integration is plug and play. That means that you simply connect your backend servers to CloudTility. You know, that could be your IBM Storage Protect, your Rubrik, your Point Archival Gate, IBM Cloud Oblux Storage. You know, you connect these servers.

[00:16:01] And now they will synchronize automatically with CloudTility. And all backups available on the backend systems will be ready to assign to the business units to which they belong. And the process is unified across the different vendor systems. And that means that CloudTility really makes things less complicated. All the reports in CloudTility, the billing, etc., it all works kind of in a set and forget manner.

[00:16:27] So, the portal owner, the owner of CloudTility, the system owner, the MSP or the enterprise, makes all the required default settings on the top level tenant. And that's once and for all set and forget. These settings are now inherited to descendant business units. And now, after assigning the backups buckets and stuff from the different backup technologies, then reports, billing, and everything else will have a unified look and feel.

[00:16:55] And end users will not have to worry about, you know, what technology is under the hood here. So, yeah, I hope that kind of gives you a reply. Absolutely. And I think with so many news feeds, there's so many headlines at the moment around tariffs, trade wars. We're starting to see U.S. organizations exploring data sovereignty and residency and keeping their company data inside the U.S.

[00:17:24] Some are saying that European nations might do the same. And, of course, many of your customers will prefer on-prem deployments over SaaS. There's so much going on here. So, can you tell me a little bit on how you see data sovereignty, control, and residency, and why they still matter, if not matter more than ever, in today's cloud-first world? Hmm. That is true. And we do have a SaaS offering.

[00:17:49] But as you mentioned, almost all of our customers, they prefer and they require to download and install CloudTility on-prem in their own data center. I think in our case, it's because that in many cases, our customers are the public or private cloud providers. And they need to live up to certain promises and SLAs with their customers.

[00:18:15] So, with an on-prem installation, they benefit from guaranteeing their customers that all of the customer data lives in the data center of the service provider and is not scattered around in the hands of multiple third-party partners. I think the global threat of cybercrime is bigger than ever before. And service providers and enterprises, they really need to be in control

[00:18:39] and they need to ensure the data is not leaving, often not leaving a certain geographical area, I would say. And hence, in some cases, are not leaving their data center. Yeah, 100% with you. And another thing, CloudTility also includes built-in reoccurring billing, white-label branding, which I know is also going to be attractive, and REST API.

[00:19:05] But collectively, how do you see these features supporting MSPs in helping to scale their services and ultimately growing revenue streams? Because I think we very often get distracted by the technology, but it's the ROI of that tech project. That's what gets the projects over the line, isn't it? Yes. I mean, in our case, utility really helps turning your investment in data protection infrastructure, turn that around, becoming a revenue engine.

[00:19:33] And the OEM feature, as an example, it really helps our MSPs to get to customers belonging to someone else. Well, not by stealing the customers, but merely working together with someone else, which could be a journaling system provider for the dentist or someone working with the doctors, the lawyers, and so on. By setting up the someone else, these partners with a branded tenant in CloudTility that has their logo and their colors and their whatever,

[00:20:03] and a cost price from the top-level service provider. Now, these partners can log in. They can create their own customers and utilize the very same billing tool to automate the billing of their own customers. So, all in all, the end customers, you know, that belongs to somebody else, if you look at it from the service provider perspective, these end customers will be happy to get a solution with the look and feel of their preferred IT partner.

[00:20:29] And the IT partner don't necessarily have the right infrastructure, have the right skills, have the right data center facilities to run a data protection facility. So, they are happy that there is someone, the MSPs, with the skills here, and with the technology here, and with the CloudTility here, that enables them to kind of get a login to provide the MSP solution as if it was there. Love that.

[00:20:55] And also, on the IT press tour, you've described CloudTility as somewhat as an umbrella platform, and as data protection needs diversify, I'm curious, how do you decide which technologies you're going to support next, and what role do things like customer conversations, customer requests, what role does that play in maybe shaping your future roadmap? Yeah, for you, in our case, the customer is king or queen.

[00:21:25] We focus our development roadmap on customer requests. I mean, of course, the whole idea of CloudTility and a lot of the functionality in CloudTility, it comes from us and the many, many years of experience and dialogues with clients, which has given our team, my great colleagues in our development, a very innovative type of thinking. But we do try to develop as much as possible from the requests that comes from our customers.

[00:21:54] And then, of course, we take these requests from the customers, and we tweet them a bit, and we give them a bit of that extra flavor and extra innovative thought that makes the customer go, oh, wow, when it's delivered back to the customer. And maybe I would just mention our name, you know, a wow, A-U-W-A-U, right? So, it's automation and always with that wow factor in mind.

[00:22:20] And we actually mean it when we, you know, take in everything we do. We try to turn it and flip it in a way so that it gets this wow factor. And from your work with universities, government agencies, and financial service providers, you cover a lot of ground here. And again, I'm curious, from everything that you're seeing and hearing and talking about,

[00:22:49] are you noticing any patterns in how organizations are maybe rethinking backup reporting and self-service expectations this year? What are you seeing and hearing? Oh, yeah. We started this adventure on the MSP side of the table. And over the years, we have seen that the IT departments of the enterprise organizations, as you mentioned, more and more are becoming internal managed service providers.

[00:23:16] You know, with the exact same needs for internal billing, departmental user, end-user self-service, and self-provisioning, and really all of what the real MSPs and hosting providers do. And therefore, CloudTility has become more and more relevant for enterprise clients. Let me think of a good example. I will mention one of our university customers.

[00:23:41] They fulfilled their faculty users' needs for self-service by implementing CloudTility on top of their data protection infrastructure. They have also been able to exchange, you know, a legacy internal billing system, which nobody dared to touch because it was made many, many years ago. And the people that kind of did this system is no longer there. So, CloudTility enabled them to kind of get rid of that legacy system.

[00:24:07] And finally, because they have invested in a scalable data protection service setup, they are now providing backup services to some external customers like other universities and other educational institutions. And, yeah, it's kind of – it is an ever-changing market, this. And, yeah, it's funny to see, and it's exciting to see how things change in this space. It really is.

[00:24:37] And for anybody interested in reading a little bit more about our wow, about CloudTility, and maybe even carrying on a conversation with your good self there, where would you like to point everyone listening? Well, come visit me in Copenhagen, Neil. You're invited as well. Or if that's not possible, then go to ourwow.com, our website. You will find explainer videos and other material, and also a link to our YouTube channel where we have more videos.

[00:25:07] And even better, maybe, for your listeners, Neil, send me a direct email on TBA to be announced at ourwow.com, and I'll be happy to, you know, set up a live demonstration, a live demo, or anything else needed to kind of evaluate a possible partnership. Love it. Well, I will add all the links you mentioned, including one of your videos. I'll add that to the show notes so people can check out all things that we've talked about today

[00:25:34] and get to learn a little bit more about everything that we've discussed. And I will also take you upon your offer next time I'm in Copenhagen. I'll be the guy outside Tivoli Gardens with a cup of glug, and we'll have a good chat there. Hopefully we can meet again soon. I look forward to that, Neil. You are definitely invited also for a cup of coffee on my private terrace. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, and I look forward to the next time we speak. Thanks again. Thanks, Neil.

[00:26:03] So a big thank you to Thomas for sharing the story behind OurWow and the innovation driving cloudtility. I think it's so important, especially in a world where data protection is more fragmented than ever. And his approach to simplifying control, billing and user access across multiple vendors, all while respecting the need for data sovereignty is one that businesses are starting to wake up to.

[00:26:30] And of course, a final shout out to the wonderful Philippe and Celine once again, because the IT Press Tour is far more than just a series of briefings. It really is like a almost, well, I feel it's a one-of-a-kind experience where global innovation meets real-world conversation. And having people from all around the world and putting them into one room, I think, is something quite unique.

[00:26:57] So if you work in enterprise tech and haven't experienced it yet, it's definitely something to keep on your radar. ITPressTour.net. But as for our conversation today, what do you think? Are we seeing the beginning of a new era where self-service and white-labeled infrastructure becomes the norm for both MSPs and internal IT teams? Let me know, as always, techblogwriteroutlook.com, LinkedIn X and Instagram.

[00:27:27] Just at Neil C. Hughes. So keep those questions and thoughts coming in. And as always, thanks more than anything for tuning in. And I will return tomorrow with another guest. So hopefully I'll get to speak with you all then.