National Nonprofit Affordably Protects Remote Staff Endpoints

For Joel Wagener, Director of IT at the American Institute of Biological Sciences (AIBS), simplicity is an important feature he looks for in software applications to use in his organization. So maybe it’s not unexpected that Wagener chose Backblaze Business Backup to back up AIBS’s staff computers. According to Wagener, “It just works.”

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AIBS is based in Washington, D.C., but is a virtual organization, with staff dispersed around the United States. AIBS needed a backup solution that worked anywhere a staff member was located, and was easy to use, as well. Wagener has made Backblaze a default part of the configuration management for all the AIBS endpoints, which in their case are exclusively Macs.

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“We started using Backblaze on a single computer in 2014, then not too long after that decided to deploy it to all our endpoints,” Wagener explained.

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Using Groups to Manage Backups Organization-Wide

“We use Groups to oversee backups and for central billing, but we let each user manage their own computer and restore files on their own if they need to. Backblaze stays out of the way until we need it. It’s fairly lightweight, and I appreciate that it’s simple,” Wagener said. “It doesn’t throttle backups and the price point is good. I have family members who use Backblaze as well.”

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In Backblaze Business Backup, 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 additions, deletions, and changes of Business Backup licenses from a single console for all Group members.

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Backblaze’s Groups feature permits an organization to oversee and manage the user accounts, including restores, or let users handle that themselves. This flexibility fits a variety of organizations, where various degrees of oversight or independence are desirable. The finance and HR departments could manage their own data, for example, while the rest of the organization could be managed by IT. All Groups can be billed centrally no matter how other functionality is set up.

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How AIBS Uses Backblaze to Minimize Downtime

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“If we have a computer that needs repair, we can put a loaner computer in that person’s hands and they can immediately get the data they need directly from the Backblaze Storage Cloud, which is really helpful. When we get the original computer back from repair we can do a complete restore and return it to the user all ready to go again. When we’ve needed restores, Backblaze has been reliable.”

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With Backblaze, AIBS can:

• Manage all the backup and restore services for all customers in one place.
• Deploy and redeploy their Business Backup licenses to their customers as needed.
• Centralize all client-based backup services into one bill.

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Backblaze Features That Make Life Easy

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Wagener also likes that the memory footprint of Backblaze is light—the clients for both Mac and Windows are native, and designed to use minimum system resources and not impact any applications used on the computer. He also likes that updates to the client software are pushed out when necessary.

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Backblaze Business Backup also helps IT maintain archives of users’ computers after they leave the organization. “We like that we have a ready-made archive of a computer when someone leaves,” said Wagener. “The Backblaze backup is there if we need to retrieve anything that person was working on.”

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There are other capabilities in Backblaze that Wagener likes, but hasn’t had a chance to use yet. “We’ve used Casper (Jamf) to deploy and manage software on endpoints without needing any interaction from the user. We haven’t used it yet for Backblaze, but we know that Backblaze supports it. It’s a handy feature to have.”

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But, ultimately, perhaps the best thing about Business Backup isn’t a specific feature that can be found on a product data sheet. Wagener explained, “Backblaze provides needed peace of mind to our users, and our IT department, as well.”

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