GC Brieau Provides Clients With Productivity and Security Solutions Through Datto Solutions
GC Brieau was founded in 2009 as a small managed service provider (MSP) based in Sherbrooke, Quebec. The company has grown organically over the years to establish itself as one of the leading MSPs in North America. Today, GC Brieau offers businesses a wide range of professional services, including digital transformation, IT modernization and IT auditing. Their core managed services offerings are centered around email security, endpoint management, infrastructure management and customer service. GC Brieau has an extensive client base in various sectors like manufacturing, accounting, law, logistics and IT across Canada, the United States and Germany.
Since the company’s founding by Marc-Antoine Brillant in 2009, GC Brieau has been one of the front runners in the region in leveraging cloud technology for the SMB world. Their expertise in cloud services enabled the business to swiftly make a name for itself in the managed services space of the Quebec province. Following their founder’s departure in December 2021, the company continued their upward trajectory under the leadership of Samuel Nadeau, president, and Julien Dernaucourt, vice president of sales & marketing, eventually growing from eight to 38 employees.
“Everything has been great with Datto — the solutions, the service, the support, and the overall experience. The Datto partnership has been a game changer for our business.”
- Company: GC Brieau
- Industry: MSP
- Location: Quebec, Canada
- Established: 2009
- Interviewed: Julien Dernaucourt, Vice President, Sales & Marketing
“Datto is probably the most-liked partner by our employees because they are always present. That’s really important because everyone’s good until something bad happens. Relationships or partnerships get tested when things get awry, but Datto has always been there to support, even from a sales or pre-sales standpoint.”
Vice President, Sales & Marketing
GC Brieau aims to always offer solutions that can help their clients both from a productivity and security standpoint. “When it comes to our solutions, we are adamant that we should give a great ROI for our customers,” states Julien Dernaucourt.
With 98% of GC Brieau’s customers using Microsoft 365, the SaaS application’s end-to-end protection is a top priority for the company. Even though they were leveraging Microsoft native services like Microsoft Defender for email protection and Azure AD for administering role permissions, GC Brieau wanted a more comprehensive solution to safeguard their clients’ Microsoft 365 data against known and unknown cyberthreats and other data loss scenarios. GC Brieau was looking for a solution that could help their clients meet business continuity, compliance regulations and security requirements simultaneously.
The GC Brieau team also ensures that their customers align with the CIS security framework so that they have a more solid cybersecurity posture. “You can’t protect what you don’t know,” notes Dernaucourt. “CIS’s helps you better aassess risks and remediate threats with a layered approach to cybersecurity and vulnerability management”.
However, on that front, GC Brieau wanted a unified approach that could ensure their clients’ data is never compromised, in turn giving both their clients and themselves IT peace of mind.
The co-managed aspect of their solutions is another differentiator the GC Brieau team takes pride in. “Many of our competitors are like a black box to their clients. The users have little access and visibility to their data. We don’t want to be that” says Dernaucourt. GC Brieau needed a solution that could complement this vision and help them deliver enhanced visibility to their clients.
To offer such superior, secure services, GC Brieau needed a competent, innovative partner in their corner — and that’s where Datto came in. Datto’s solutions have been integral to GC Brieau’s customer offerings.
For instance, Datto SaaS Protection + helps GC Brieau go beyond native protection and offer multilayered security for their clients’ Microsoft 365 data. Purpose-built for MSPs, this solution combines SaaS protection with SaaS defense, backing up data three times a day while offering advanced threat protection. Datto SaaS Protection + helps GC Brieau streamline data compliance, business continuity and security for their clients, all at predictable pricing. Client onboarding is a breeze with the solution, and client backups can be managed effortlessly.
For those GC Brieau clients with cybersecurity at the top of their minds, Datto’s more comprehensive business continuity suite — Datto Unified Continuity — comes into play. The suite helps GC Brieau cater to their clients’ business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) needs.
Datto Autotask Professional Services Automation (PSA) is another Datto solution that helps GC Brieau deliver first-rate services to its clients. Datto Autotask is a robust, cloud-based PSA platform that can act as a single pane of glass for an entire business. With powerful analytics and intuitive dashboards, Autotask PSA enhances clients’ visibility into their business operations and provides actionable business insights for every role. It empowers GC Brieau’s clients to centralize business operations and make data-driven decisions that can improve their service, productivity and profitability. Autotask’s client portal also enables GC Brieau to collaborate with their customers on tickets and projects, service desk operations, portal administration tasks and more.
With such innovative solutions, GC Brieau is giving its competitors a run for their money today. Adding to it is the extensive expertise the GC Brieau team brings to the table. “Samuel and I have strong expertise working in large enterprises — him in the IT domain and I in sales and marketing. Leaning on this experience, we are offering enterprise-grade services to SMBs. Our clients are getting the same level of expert services as the large enterprises in the country,” says Dernaucourt.
According to Dernaucourt, the successful partnership with Datto has been critical to their business. “It has been a great experience with Datto’s solutions. Take the PSA solution, for example. You can integrate pretty much anything you would want in Autotask PSA. It offers great visibility. It offers 100% of what an MSP would want to do in a single platform,” says Dernaucourt.
He adds, “We have been working closely with Datto. In fact, we had their banner right next to ours in a show last week. It has indeed been a privilege to do business with Datto.”