Broadening data protection in the Microsoft cloud

Own was founded on the idea that there is a unique challenge and opportunity in protecting customer data within software as a service (SaaS) solutions. Focusing solely on Salesforce out of the gate, the company has quickly grown to be the top provider of SaaS-focused data protection, with more than 4,500 clients worldwide. When customers began requesting similar business continuity capabilities for Microsoft Dynamics 365 environments, it was a natural next step for Own to join the Microsoft ISV Connect program in support of this new platform. 

“The Microsoft relationship is incredibly strategic for us, and we are delighted by the recent investments and changes to the ISV Connect program,” said Brad Orluck, Microsoft Alliance Director at Own. “It’s clear from the investments in the program that Microsoft is committed to helping its ISV partners succeed.”

While SaaS solutions like Dynamics 365 offer standard backup capabilities, Own’s purpose-built solution provides much more granularity and control in restoring data and ensuring compliance. In addition to automating backups, customers can proactively monitor and receive alerts of significant changes to data tables, compare snapshots to isolate changes, and manage data policies. 

Customers can also recover the exact data they need from as far back as required—from a single file to an entire data store—with all necessary hierarchy and relationships intact. “We want to be the easy button for data protection,” said Orluck. “We offer granular, point-in-time recovery so Dynamics 365 customers can get data back into production quickly.”

Own was able to bring its solution to market relatively rapidly by integrating it with Microsoft Dataverse, a common data framework that allows users to securely store and manage data used across business applications such as Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. 

“Microsoft Dataverse is a world-class destination for customer data,” said Orluck. “It’s expanding to offer new ways for customers to leverage data, which naturally helps us because we can then extend protection to even more data as part of our Microsoft integration.”

Hearing aid company improves protection of B2B, customer data

One of the customers excited about Own’s new support for Dynamics 365 was Starkey Hearing Technologies, a company that develops, manufactures, and distributes digital hearing systems globally. The company was using Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement to manage its B2B accounts, including generating leads and routing customers to hearing aid providers for appointments. “We have to capture everything from creating the lead to creating the opportunity to generating invoicing all within Dynamics, with layers of metadata pertinent to each account hierarchy,” said Tim Dailey, CRM Manager at Starkey Hearing Technologies. 

About six months ago, the Starkey team noticed that data had been changed in the system. Child accounts were now under the wrong parent accounts, creating the potential to route patients to the wrong location. The Starkey team was able to fix the problem, but it took eight hours to extract the data that had changed over the last 30 days and then three full days to manually restore the child/parent relationships. 

Starkey decided to implement Own, and minutes after deployment  were able to start backing up their data. “With Own, we can go in and restore data down to a single record, across any timeframe, and that’s huge,” said Dailey. “If we had this in place six months ago, we could have restored that data in 10 minutes rather than three days.” 

Starkey has already found additional ways to benefit from the solution. During a recent dual-write integration between Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management, the team was able to move huge amounts of data, knowing that if anything went wrong, it could restore down to a single table, if necessary. 

The company also began building new Power Apps for its website, including a quote tool, product search tool, and insurance calculator. Because the data will be stored in Dataverse, everything can be backed up and protected within Own. “We have to have a secure restoration process, and Own gives us peace of mind. We know that we can work on these projects and take advantage of the low-code benefits of Power Apps while still protecting our data,” said Dailey. “If something happens, we can fix it in minutes.”

Hitting the ground running with ISV Connect

Own is looking to rapidly grow its footprint in the Microsoft ecosystem and has already secured several new enterprise, mid-market, and SMB customers. 

As a new ISV Connect partner, the company has already leveraged technical benefits like Technical Onboarding and free partner sandbox licenses to improve development and delivery and is digging into GTM benefits around listing optimization, P2P engagement, and lead generation. “We want to build a lot of pipeline around this go-to-market, so these technical and GTM benefits are really important for us to take advantage of,” said Orluck. 

Own has also signed up to be part of the AppSource transactability pilot, testing new functionality that allows customers to purchase solutions directly from the AppSource marketplace. “Like with the Azure Marketplace, we are finding that customers want to transact through AppSource, so we are very excited to be one of the early participants giving customers the purchase options they are looking for,” concluded Orluck.