Thomas Peer on Building Long-Term Relationships and Trust
•February 20, 2026
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Companies Mentioned
Why It Matters
By aligning data protection with business outcomes, Thomas Peer helps enterprises justify security spend and improve cyber‑insurance terms, a model other MSPs are likely to emulate.
Key Takeaways
- •Thomas Peer uses Wasabi for immutable cloud backups.
- •Focuses on C‑suite risk and ROI conversations.
- •Limited vendor strategy builds deep trust.
- •Immutable backups reduce cyber‑insurance costs.
- •Partnership earned MSP of the Year award.
Pulse Analysis
Enterprises are grappling with exponential data growth as cloud adoption and AI workloads accelerate, while ransomware attacks continue to rise. Traditional backup methods often fall short because they can be altered or deleted by malicious actors, prompting a market shift toward immutable storage solutions. Cloud providers such as Wasabi offer write‑once, read‑many (WORM) capabilities that lock data in a tamper‑proof state, ensuring a reliable restore point even if primary systems are compromised. This technical evolution is becoming a prerequisite for any modern data‑protection strategy.
What sets Thomas Peer apart is its decision to sell that capability as a business outcome rather than a pure IT service. Udara Dharmadasa meets directly with CEOs, CFOs and CIOs, translating technical resilience into measurable risk reduction, insurance premium discounts and clear return‑on‑investment calculations. By quantifying how immutable backups lower the likelihood of data‑loss claims, the MSP helps clients negotiate better cyber‑insurance terms and justify security budgets at the board level. This C‑suite‑first approach is reshaping how managed service providers position themselves in a crowded market.
The success of that model hinges on deep vendor trust, which is why Thomas Peer limits its ecosystem to a handful of partners such as Wasabi. A single, reliable storage platform simplifies integration, reduces operational overhead and creates a clear value proposition that can be presented to senior leadership. The partnership was recognized when Thomas Peer captured the MSP of the Year award, reinforcing the idea that relationship‑driven, value‑added services are a competitive differentiator. As more MSPs adopt similar trusted‑partner strategies, the industry is likely to see accelerated adoption of immutable cloud backup as a standard component of enterprise resilience.
Thomas Peer on building long-term relationships and trust
Professional IT service providers like Thomas Peer state enterprise customers are trying to get a better handle on data protection as cloud use and AI grow.
This is in parallel with particular concern about ransomware, backups, and the sheer volume of data they now hold.
In an interview with ARN, Thomas Peer Solutions CEO Udara Dharmadasa explained how it uses cloud storage like Wasabi as an independent backup location and for immutable copies.
This allows data to be recovered if primary systems or backups are compromised. But along with the technology is the way Dharmadasa approaches customers at a business level rather than a purely technical one.
He is speaking directly with C‑suite executives about risk, resilience, and ROI instead of just “backup” or digital resilience features.
Thomas Peer goes to market with a small set of deeply trusted vendors like Wasabi, positioning integrated, modern data protection — such as off‑platform and immutable copies—as something customers can confidently take to their boards.
“A lot of CIOs understand that you need backups. But what Wasabi and Thomas Peer offer together is a solution – it’s not just backups,” Dharmadasa said. “You know, you can have backups, but how about making sure that the backups can be restored? Okay, so that’s one part of the problem. Then how about the back making sure the backups aren’t compromised? How about the backups are immutable?
“These are the additional complications when it comes to backups.”
According to Dharmadasa where Thomas Peer and its vendor partner come together and offering a solution that can be taken to the business executives.
“When I actually talk with enterprise customers, I talk to CEOs and CFOs,” he said. “I do not talk to any layer beyond below that, because I need to understand their strategy in order to give them a business solution.
“Our engineers and tech guys can easily give them a technical solution. If they want a backup, we can give a backup.
“It’s not rocket science these days, but if they want to modernise their data protection posture, that’s a different conversation that we need.”
Dharmadasa said these are the conversations that Thomas Peer is having, and in order to do that, it needs to understand what their customer’s business priorities are. As well as their business risk.
“This is where the whole conversation dives into things like cyber protection and things like cyber insurance,” he noted. “I mean some customers implement Wasabi’s Covert Copy or things like that, simply to reduce the cost of cyber insurance.
“That is a business value that you can deliver, and that all adds up to the ROI.”
Trust is hard earned and easily broken
This is not a conversation that you can have with a network manager, explained Dharmadasa.
“This is a conversation that needs to be had with the C-level executive, CFO, CIO or CEO – hence the direct link to their strategy,” he said.
Trust is everything to Thomas Peer and that means having a relationship with customers based on trust, and in turn they trust the IT services provider to and its trust in their vendors.
“The trust in vendors that we have also is fundamental to developing this relationship and taking products to the market,” Dharmadasa explained. “As an example, we only have a handful of focused products, and Wasabi is one of them because we don’t go with options with 100 different clouds.
“We go with Wasabi, that’s it, because we 100 per cent trust them. That’s where our data is, that’s where our solution is, and when we are having a hard day, they just back us.
“That’s how it has been for many deals, and I don’t see that changing in the near future at all.”
For Dharmadasa who has done business for many years — 25 plus years — this understanding hasn’t changed during that time, and he doesn’t foresee it changing again.
“There are some vendors and distributors that have broken that trust, and they’re no longer in our picture,” he said. “Sadly, in this day and age they don’t understand that — they are the one who are losing, because we won’t actually take them again.
“Once the trust is broken, it’s very hard to rebuild that.”
For Wasabi A/NZ country managing director Craig Stockdale treating its partners as an extension of Wasabi’s business requires developing a relationship, rather than treating is as transactional.
“That scaling depends on valued partners who add real value to customers, share aligned values and culture, and can rely on Wasabi to keep innovating and supporting them,” he told ARN.
“Thomas Peer has pulled together a raft of solutions to transform customers, secure their base — protecting their data and providing them with an end-to-end service.
“For us it’s great to work with partners like this who are innovating, who rely on us as a vital part of their offering, albeit a small component, a vital part of their, off their solution set, to go to market with these customers.
“What’s important for Thomas Peer is to be able to rely on us to also innovate.”
Partner relationships
That need for innovation requires vendors like Wasabi to have a close working relationship.
“I think that’s the fundamentals of any business who want to scale,” Stockdale said. “The only way you can scale is by having valued partners, and if those partners are bringing value to the client base, then it’s a win, win for all scenarios.”
“The only way you can scale is by having valued partners, and if those partners are bringing value to the client base, then it’s a win, win, win for all scenarios.”
It makes Stockdale a little sad see that the value of the relationship between and partners can be less than that.
“Everybody’s out to, you know, drive more business and to make more money,” he said. But at the end of the day, if you’re not adding value, then what is your role?
“I mean, that’s primarily what we’re here to do, is to add value to our partners, add value to the end user.”
Stockdale said Wasabi has “created a little bit of a niche for ourselves as a disrupter in the cloud storage”. The cloud storage vendor is starting to see some real momentum, “which is fantastic”.
That’s all about coming back to that core value of value add,” he noted. “That’s what I think we do and the rest of it’s in partnerships.
“If you want to scale, you need partners and if you need partners, you want them to be able to trust you and in turn to be able to trust them.”
That comes back to core values, and the values of the individual and the companies, Stockdale reiterated.
“Our chief executive officer David Friend has really pushed across the company globally our Hot Program,” Stockdale said. “Hot cloud storage also has a hot culture inside Wasabi, and that hot culture is based around humility, ownership and togetherness, and they’re the three core values that are important to us.
“Udara Dharmadasa can see that we do have a hot culture, and he feels comfortable in working with us and knowing that we’ve got his back.”
As part of its giving back to partners that Wasabi announced the winners of its 2025 Partner Network Awards in January this year, with a few A/NZ partners being recognised.
This includes Crayon who won Distributor of the Year, while MVP went to Perfekt business development manager — David Cochrane. Other winners include Think Solutions for Reseller of the Year and Thomas Peer taking the MSP of the Year award.
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