CASE STUDY

Bright Bear Technology Solutions

Backblaze for Business simplifies data backup billing and management

Back in 2009, Bright Bear Technology Solutions started with hourly break-fix services, just like everyone else in the business. They billed hours, solved problems, and built a stellar reputation. Over time they extracted the best practices from their most successful deployments to create a group of managed services they, and more importantly their customers, could rely on. Today, these services are the cornerstone of their thriving managed services business.

“We start with backup,” Nathan is fond of saying, “For a managed service provider, a good backup makes everything less stressful.” That’s where Backblaze for Business comes in. Bright Bear uses Backblaze in their portfolio of managed services to backup the data on their customer’s Mac and Windows-based client systems.

Nathan Phinney is the President of Bright Bear Technology Solutions, an IT Managed Service Provider in Irvine, California. They offer turnkey IT solutions built on a managed service platform based on proven processes and methods from their most successful deployments.

For a managed service provider, a good backup makes everything less stressful.
- Nathan Phinney

They decided to look at other solutions for client backup and tried Backblaze for Business. Backblaze provided unlimited data storage for each client system, was easy to setup and use, and was a fixed price. No surprises, just backup – it fit right into the Bright Bear philosophy. They made the switch to Backblaze and never looked back. Backblaze for Business is now part of the Managed Services solution set they provide to their customers.

In early 2017, Backblaze introduced a new version of Backblaze for Business that included Groups, centralized billing, improved license management and more. Led by Roger Gentry, Project Manager at Bright Bear, they migrated their customers to the new version of Backblaze within the first few days that the new version was available.

Their previous backup solution was tier-based, charging by the amount of data each computer stored. Randomly and unknowingly, a customer would exceed their storage limit causing either the system to stop backing up or an unexpected increase in the cost. As a consequence, Bright Bear spent non-productive time managing backup quotas, computer-by-computer, a process that would not scale as their business grew.

After reviewing the potential configurations, Roger selected a single group implementation for Bright Bear. This configuration allowed Bright Bear to:

The single group set-up works well for Bright Bear, but a Managed Service Provider can also chose other options. For example, you can create multiple business groups, perhaps assigning a given group to given customer or department. Each group has it’s own billing, but one administrator can manage the billing for multiple groups. This is ideal when you need to know the expense of each individual group, but want to pay one bill.

Another feature of groups is that you can choose how you want to manage the backup of the group members:

Managed - In managed groups administrators are able to “manage” a member’s Backblaze account, including: Browsing data; Creating restores; And updating account information for a user. A user must “opt-in” by acknowledging the administrative rights to join a Managed Group.

Unmanaged - In an unmanaged group, administrators are responsible for paying for the Backblaze service the Group provides, but are otherwise unable to manage a member’s account.

If you have multiple groups, you can have a combination of managed and unmanaged groups as needed.

Bright Bear believes it is their job to make technology work for their customer’s – not the other way around. As such, they use reliable, best-in-class products as part of their managed service. This lets their customer’s spend their time being homebuilders, dentists, industrial fabricators, or whatever and let’s Bright Bear do the IT part.

About Backblaze for Business

Backblaze for Business provides unlimited, automatic data backup for Mac and Windows clients for as little as $x/month per computer. In Backblaze for Business, Groups allow businesses, organizations, and even families to:

Organize their Backblaze users into groups that can be set-up, managed, and billed centrally.
Create managed groups that allow the group admins to manage the restores for all group members.
Easily see the backup status of all users in the group.
Manage adds, deletes, and changes of Backblaze for Business licenses from a single console for all group members.

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