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Aptean is an enterprise software company backed by four private equity firms, providing ERP, supply chain management, and warehouse management systems to manufacturing-focused industries. The company’s core verticals are manufacturing, food and beverage and dealer management systems, now in growth. Aptean’s customer base spans North America, Europe and Asia Pacific, with a sweet spot of mid-sized and small-scale companies worldwide.
Ravi Reddy has spent roughly two decades at Aptean and is the original architect of Aptean’s SaaS/cloud practice which he has overseen for the past seven years.
“Being an MSP with quite a large environment, availability is the most important thing. My North Star has always been security, availability, and cost.”
— Ravi Reddy, Sr Director, Cloud Ops + Technology Transformation
The challenge: single-cloud risk in a compliance-heavy industry
Aptean’s customers run mission-critical manufacturing systems, many of them subject to strict regulatory requirements. Because a large share of Aptean’s customer base operates in food and beverage, data protection isn’t optional. It has to satisfy FDA compliance in the US and comparable GDPR-driven retention requirements in Europe.
That set of requirements shaped exactly what Aptean needed from a backup and recovery strategy:
- Long retention periods to meet compliance obligations across US and EU regulatory regimes
- Availability of data even if a primary cloud region went down, with a fast path back online
- Immutable backups customers could rely on, with confidence that data would never go stale
Before working with N2W, Aptean relied on traditional backup methodologies. But as the business grew, a structural risk became clear: Aptean’s environment was built almost entirely on a single cloud provider.
“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Earlier on, when we were just an AWS partner, everything was just AWS. That means if AWS went down, no matter you had your backups or not, you’re done.“
Reddy is direct about the limits of relying on a single provider’s resilience commitments, however strong: even when public cloud providers commit to a multi-region approach, a network-level outage in a given zone can still cut off access to data entirely. For a business supporting manufacturing customers around the world, that single point of failure was a risk Aptean could not accept long-term.
Why N2W?
The decision to choose N2W and stay as a partner over the years expanding the relationship was made for two specific reasons.
1. A Commitment to Multi-Cloud
When Aptean first became an N2W customer, the company was solely on AWS, being the hyperscaler’s pioneer backup and disaster recovery solutoin. However, with plans to expand into Azure in the near future, Reddy was on board with N2W’s new cloud-agnostic recovery capabilities. Shortly afterwards, N2W Multicloud and cross-cloud features matured, giving Aptean the ability to backup and recover both VMs and disks across providers rather than being locked into the cloud it started on. This became even more relevant in recent years as cloud outages became more frequent and affected more and more of Aptean’s customers.
“N2W followed through on its roadmap, which gave me the confidence to stay with them as we expanded into Azure. That partnership continued and strenghtened as we grew across clouds and moved our data onto Wasabi as well.”
2. Ease of Deployment and Ongoing Operations
Beyond multi-cloud reach, Reddy points to the practical, day-to-day experience of running N2W: straightforward deployment, and equally straightforward upgrades and retention management over time. For a lean, automation-first Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team, that operational simplicity matters as much as the underlying capability.
“We are a tight SRE team that relies on automation versus manual clicking of buttons. API-based, programmatic control of the application versus everything being a manual click would go a long way.“
3. A partnership that scaled with Aptean
Reddy points to N2W’s responsiveness as a defining part of the relationship, which was consistent regardless of how Aptean’s spend or footprint changed over time.
“No matter how big or small our requests were, N2W’s team consistently provided the same level of responsiveness and support. It’s been phenomenal.”
Adding Wasabi: off-site, cost-effective
For Aptean, true resilience meant going beyond backup within a single provider’s ecosystem. Customer demand pushed Aptean toward an architecture where data was not only backed up and stored into a different cloud entirely, but where they could save significantly on storage costs.
That requirement is what made N2W’s partnership with Wasabi Technologies a strategic fit, giving Aptean a true off-cloud storage layer (independent of both AWS and Azure) combined with hot-tier performance and low-cost archive tiering.
- Off-cloud redundancy: Backup copies live outside the primary AWS/Azure environment entirely, removing the single-provider point of failure
- Encryption, KMS and MUA: Wasabi layers its own encryption, key management and Multi User Authentication on top of N2W’s backup security, adding layers of data protection
- Cross-cloud restore: Storing data outside the primary cloud made it straightforward to restore into a different cloud entirely when needed
- Significantly lower cost than comparable storage from other major cloud providers, even at hot-tier performance
“Wasabi was a major shift and a requirement for our storage needs — not only for the hot performance that they provide, but also their cost. It has been significantly cheaper than some of the other cloud providers. That was one of the most important requirements for us to continue doing business with N2W.“
“Always test a provider as much as possible. With N2W, we’ve stressed it to the limits before we expanded it, which is why we are where we are. N2W passed the test.”
The need for high availability
For Aptean, availability is the ultimate priority: when a region or cloud goes down, the goal is to get back online as quickly as possible. Before scaling N2W across the business, Reddy’s team used N2W Recovery Scenarios to test cross-cloud recovery under a range of real-world conditions.
- Performance-tested: Failover was validated against actual workload and IOPS requirements.
- Stress-tested: Full-environment recovery scenarios including regional and full cloud outages before broader company-wide adoption.
“N2W passed the test, and has been a great product to ensure our recoveries are complete, healthy, and automated.”
Looking ahead
Reddy expects demand for backup and recovery to grow sharply as AI accelerates data creation and retention across the industry. As data volumes increase, so will the need for scalable, cost-effective protection—and the flexibility to move data beyond a single cloud or storage platform.
Avoiding storage lock-in will become increasingly important, particularly for SaaS workloads. Organizations will need the ability to move and retain data in external storage, regardless of the underlying platform.
“As storage grows, the need for backup and recovery will grow with it. I think it could increase by at least 10x. As N2W continues expanding its multi-cloud and cross-cloud capabilities, maintaining that flexibility and avoiding storage lock-in will be key. I don’t see another vendor addressing this to the same degree.”