About Data Canopy
Data Canopy is a hybrid infrastructure provider headquartered in the United States. The company reduces the cost and complexity of hybrid and multicloud environments by connecting, storing, and securing physical and virtual infrastructure under one invoice. Custom-fit data center solutions ensure businesses get the infrastructure, network redundancy, and security that best supports their data and business needs now and as they grow.
Key Points
- Sliced cloud data transfer fees in half for a customer who was paying $20,000 US in monthly egress by switching them from VPN tunneling to private connectivity into Megaport’s global Software Defined Network (SDN).
- Deployed a global network solution for a customer by utilizing Megaport’s international presence and virtual routing service, Megaport Cloud Router.
- Launched Canopy Connect, a product that lowers barriers to entry to cloud connectivity for Data Canopy customers by enabling them to connect to major public clouds without having to invest in infrastructure or hardware.
- Offered cost-effective data-center-to-data-center connectivity to their customers through Megaport.
Case Study Snapshot
IaaS provider Data Canopy reduces their customers’ cloud egress fees by almost 50% by working with Megaport and expands global reach with Canopy Connect, which enables customers to connect to major public clouds without investing in physical infrastructure.
Challenges
Delivered a global network solution in short timeline
As an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) company, Data Canopy offers colocation hosting in 16 data centers worldwide.
A logistics and manufacturing firm headquartered in South Carolina came to Data Canopy with a difficult, business critical challenge. The company struggled with slow connection speeds for 500 users in Mainland China, whose emails were getting stuck with download speeds of just 250 kbps, which is 1/400 of what is considered a fast home internet connection today.
After working unsuccessfully for over six months with multiple vendors to come up with potential fixes, the customer turned to Data Canopy. Data Canopy and Megaport collaborated to design and deploy a custom solution to improve the global network reliability for this customer.
Solution
Megaport and Data Canopy developed the network design in under a week. The solution would connect from Shenzhen to one of Megaport’s points-ofpresence (PoPs) in Hong Kong, and then on to a Megaport Cloud Router in Singapore, where application traffic would be delineated to the United States for the customer.
Data Canopy built out the proposed network design in Shenzhen and Hong Kong and deployed the joint solution for the customer on a short timeline, improving their data transmission speed from 250 kbps to 100 mbps and allowing the company to resume normal business operations.
Benefits
“Immediate potential reduction in egress fee costs”
As a Megaport partner for the past four years, Data Canopy has been able to save their customers a lot of money on cloud data transfer fees by working with Megaport.
“The flexibility to scale with Megaport has been a big value to us. For us, the speed and the quickness to turn around
and say: ‘Yeah, I can have that delivered in a day, or I can have that delivered as soon as a cross connect is installed,’ where we’re putting the onus on the data center for speed as opposed to our carrier, [is important our customers].”Adam Thomas, EVP of Sales Engineering, Data Canopy
“We build out private cloud infrastructure and…AWS or Azure servers for our customers,” said Adam Thomas, EVP of Sales Engineering at Data Canopy. “[With Megaport], it allows us to go into conversations with customers with an immediate potential reduction in egress fee costs. That becomes a primary portion of the conversation for us. Prior to our relationship with Megaport, [Data Canopy customers] were just connecting via VPN and getting hit with egress fees.”
One of these customers, a data infrastructure software company based in the United Kingdom, was paying $20,000 US a month in egress fees until Data Canopy enabled private connectivity to AWS Direct Connect on Megaport’s global, private Software Defined Network (SDN). The customer’s monthly egress fees were sliced in half.
“We became the educator and the challenger in that solution to help our customers,” Thomas added. “There’s an immediate, dollar value-add.”
Typically, Data Canopy customers can save almost 50% in egress fees when using AWS Direct Connect and 66% when using Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute.
Reducing barriers to connectivity
Data Canopy also uses Megaport to offer customers data-center-to-data-center connectivity. Rather than riding a data center operator’s network between data centers, which can be up to 2.5 times more costly than using Megaport’s SDN, Data Canopy sets up Megaport Ports inside partner data centers so they can scale up or down their connectivity based on customer demand.
“The flexibility to scale with Megaport has been a big value to us,” said Thomas, who also pointed out that provisioning traditional private lines between data centers can often take 60-90 days with a carrier. “We work primarily in the agent channel, so we’re a step removed from the end user. For us, the speed and the quickness to turn around and say: ‘Yeah, I can have that delivered in a day, or I can have that delivered as soon as a cross connect is installed,’ where we’re putting the onus on the data center for speed as opposed to a carrier, [is important to our customers].”
Data Canopy also launched a product named Canopy Connect, which reduces the barriers to entry to cloud connectivity for Data Canopy customers. With Canopy Connect, which is enabled by Megaport, their customers can connect to the cloud inside a Data Canopy colocation facility without purchasing a cabinet or any hardware. Often, the monthly egress savings exceed the cost of the Canopy Connect service.
Future Plans for Data Canopy
Data Canopy expects to continue to leverage Megaport’s Network as a Service offerings as a way to reduce customers’ cloud costs and deploy turnkey global network solutions that improve performance and reliability.