Hello Matt,

We have received your feedback regarding our cloud practices and would like to take this opportunity to address it with you.

Maintenance for our clients cloud boxes is provided as a service within our contract and outlined in section 2 of the T&C’s.  I have copied an excerpt from section 2.2 for you, as all of our cloud customers have signed off on this service.

2.2. Maintenance and Updates SOTI endeavors to regularly maintain and update the Cloud. Maintenance, updates, upgrades, modifications and the time of their release are left to the sole discretion of SOTI. Scheduled maintenance, not including nightly optimization, emergency maintenance, updates, modifications and/or upgrades will be communicated via email to technical contact and/or the SOTI web page www.soti.net.  

As it is a reasonable request to have clients maintain their own files, folders and packages etc….  the reality is that many of our clients rely on us to provide them with “best practices” when managing there servers content and may not be aware that storing unnecessarily large files, outdated packages, logs and/or large data collection files indefinitely, can affect their cloud experience.

As we work within our cloud teams guidelines, our Support Technicians have been tasked with being proactive and frequently request additional resources after we have made reasonable attempts at  properly maintaining the existing resources first.    

Rest assured that our cloud solutions are “elastic” but best practices must be exercised in order and that is why we communicate this reasonable request for maintenance directly to you, to ensure that any resolutions we deem necessary are amicable solutions. Hopefully this doesn’t inconvenience you as our intentions are  genuine. 

If more clarification is required private message me your case number and we can include an Account Manager in your case correspondence to ensure that this is communicated properly and that you are aware of all options and pricing models to resolve any other concerns with SOTI's hosted cloud solutions.   

Regards,

Hi Matt,

We had some customers using MobiControl Cloud for years, but I have never heard about such requests, possibly because my customers did not use any policies that demand lots of storage space.   

How many device licenses are there in your cloud instance? 

MobiControl cloud instances are hosted on Amazon AWS, which charges different resources (CPU, memory, storage space, outgoing traffic, etc.)  by actual usage.  If there are lots of device licenses,  costs of upgrading required resources to achieve reasonable performance can probably be covered by the device license fee.  However, if there are excessive (or even intentional abusive) usage of some resources such as storage or outgoing traffic (e.g. many pcg packages or content library files,  file-sync rules of very big files, large number of always-on remote control session, etc. ),  it is possible that Soti can support that without losing money only if extra premium is paid.  This is especially true for cloud instances with small number of device licenses.

We host a number of Zebra Android Firmware Updates and Lifeguard patches that can run upwards of 1GB each for each of the device models that we support. We typically encapsulate these in Packages complete with post install scripts to auto-process them. Apparently the Packages are stored directly in the database which has a storage limit around 5GB. The recommendation is to use the File Sync rule instead which is a relatively frustrating answer given our preference to leverage the Package and Profile process.