---
slug: fonicom
title: "How Corso helps Fonicom deliver a more reliable experience for internal backups"
description: "Corso, an open-source tool for backing up Microsoft 365 Data, was lucky to have Kias Hanifa from Fonicom take a look at our tool. He was kind enough to write this guest post."
authors: kias
tags: [corso, microsoft 365, backups, MSP]
date: 2023-3-06
image: ./images/servers.png
---

![media server By Victor Grigas/Wikimedia Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44043618](./images/servers.png)

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*Corso, an open-source tool for backing up Microsoft 365 Data, was lucky to have
Kias Hanifa, CTO at Fonicom, extensively test it. He was kind enough to write
this guest post*
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I’d like to tell the story of how Corso is helping us build
a more reliable experience for our clients. To start with, a word about my company:
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[Fonicom](https://www.fonicom.com/about/#) is a multi-disciplinary ICT solutions company specializing in systems
integration and software development. Our systems integration expertise covers
networking, security, virtualisation, mobility, storage, Linux, Open-source
technologies, public and private cloud solutions, business continuity,
productivity, unified communications and collaboration, amongst others.

## From open source to public cloud

Originally, our main differentiator was our knowledge of open-source tools. We
were open-source enthusiasts, and it had a strong business case as one of our
key offerings. As we’ve grown, and as a SaaS/open-source hybrid approach has
gotten more standard, we’ve now got AWS Partner, Dell Titanium Partner, Google,
and Microsoft Partner status.

There was a time when people mainly looked to managed service providers to give
expertise in tools that had no other support. In the last several years though
everyone acknowledges the need for public cloud expertise.

As we got into cloud offerings, we found things like Microsoft Office 365 and
AWS S3 to offer market-leading solutions to our customers. I further identified
that Microsoft 365 backups were a key area where people wanted better tools.
This led me to discover Corso.

## The most important part of any open-source project

When I first explored Corso I knew right away that they had the most important
feature for any open-source project, or any software project: clear
documentation.

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Corso is a tool for bridging two public clouds: creating backups of Microsoft
Office 365 and sending them to object storage such as AWS S3. That means setup
is relatively simple and involves connecting the two systems to each other.
The documentation was straightforward to understand and follow
and I got started almost right away.
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## What it means to be a Managed Service Provider

We serve a lot of blue chip companies and Fortune 500 companies at Fonicom, and
it’s reasonable to ask: what's the most central benefit they get from our
managed services?

Fundamentally, what Fonicom gives its clients is peace of mind. When a team
elects to use a managed service provider they’re giving a strong signal that
they don’t want to be running into the limits of our platform. They don’t want
unexpected errors and they don’t want to discover that they’re experiencing an
edge case leading to unexpected failure.

While evaluating Corso I really tried to put the tool through its paces, since I
knew my clients would have high expectations of any backup offering. You can
test a hundred scenarios in your own process, but, as an MSP, if the client
finds even a small glitch, they will quickly get in touch to complain. This is
where we were impressed by how well the Corso team addressed our requirements
and how well the Corso-based backups worked with the complex and large Microsoft
365 setups found in our environments.

## The second most important part of any open-source project

Corso is a new project, and it’s not yet at v1. While testing it out, I
ran into cases that the tool couldn’t handle. That was when I joined the Corso
Discord and interacted directly with the team. I felt a lot more confident in
using Corso, because wow, this team really knows what they’re doing!

In the course of our testing, as our team tested Corso extensively for large
backups, not only did the team work hard to understand the problem, but new
releases in direct response to our bugs quickly resolved any issues we ran into.

One example that stands out is an error caused by a user having two calendars
with identical names. Naming two calendars the same isn’t supported in Office
365 and can only happen as part of a merge or migration. This is the kind of
edge case that could really affect my clients! When I discussed the problem with
the Corso team, they were able to release a fix soon after.

## Giving back to the open-source community

It feels great to get to offer my feedback and my support to this free and
open-source community. I’ve long been a supporter of open-source tools, and it’s
so gratifying to see new solutions for longstanding problems

---

### A word from Corso
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We’re immensely grateful to Kias and all our early users for being generous with
their time and attention as it has rapidly improved Corso's stability and robustness.
It’s a great feeling, being the only free and
open-source tool to back up Microsoft Office 365 data. If you’d like to give us
a try please take a look a the
[quickstart guide](https://corsobackup.io/docs/quickstart/), then join Kias and others
on [the Corso discord](https://discord.gg/63DTTSnuhT) to tell us what you think!
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