The first thing Matt Spring, IT Manager, noticed when he joined PagerDuty was that they worked in the cloud. While everyone carried around a laptop or perhaps had a desktop system, there were no file servers, no database servers, no mail servers, no servers of any kind located in the office. As first glance, it seemed everyone simply connected to the Internet and used cloud-based applications, but as Matt soon discovered many people were also using Mac based applications as well. Matt instinctively knew he had a “backup” problem and he had to act to ensure the organization would not lose important data.
The “backup” problem that Matt faced, is one encountered by companies that use both cloud-based and PC/Mac-based applications in their environment. For example, a company might use a cloud-based HR system, but Office applications on their laptops and desktops. While Matt had some confidence the cloud-based data was backed up, the local data on the company’s laptops and desktops was not being backed up.
Matt Spring joined PagerDuty as their first IT hire. PagerDuty is a high-growth company that provides the leading digital operations management platform for businesses. Matt is a self-described jack-of-trades and was brought on board to help build out the network for a new building and provide comprehensive IT services. During his tenure, Matt and his team have supported PagerDuty as they’ve grown their staff nearly 10-fold.
As Matt was building a list of backup vendors, he included Backblaze; he was aware of them because he had been following their Hard Drive stats blog posts. He appreciated the company’s transparency and included them in the list. His primary criteria for selecting a backup service was that the solution had to:
- Be able to be installed with little or no user involvement.
- Automatically backup all the data on a laptop or desktop with no user intervention.
- Be affordable.
After a review process, he chose Backblaze for Business.
As PagerDuty grew, so did the number of laptops and desktops, and Matt and his team ensured that Backblaze was installed on all of them. This was especially important to PagerDuty as some of the newly hired employees worked in other locations across the globe. Matt could send them a system provisioned with Backblaze and from the moment the new employee started working, they were being backed up to the Backblaze cloud.
One of the features that Matt likes is how Backblaze scans the users’ system looking for data to backup versus having to pick and choose folders and files. He points out how he once restored an “Office autorecovery file” from Backblaze when a user forgot to save several hours of work before their system crashed. He commented that
“no other cloud backup system that I know of would have automatically backed up that file.”
Over the years that PagerDuty has been a Backblaze for Business customer, they’ve had several instances where they needed to restore data. Every restore has been successful.
As a bonus, most users find the restore process easy enough so they can restore their own files, but Matt and his team have from time to time done complete system restores to replace a failed or lost system.
Recently, Matt and his team upgraded for free to the most recent release of Backblaze for Business. This release included “Business Groups.” This feature allows administrators to organize users into groups for billing and management purposes, for example: administrators, executives, and staff. Groups can also be managed or unmanaged, for example, having contractors and interns in a managed group where IT controls the restore process, while company employees could be in one or more unmanaged groups as desired.
Matt appreciates the flexibility that Business Groups provides.
As PagerDuty continues to grow, Matt expects the organization to be more and more dispersed, with even more employees and contractors spread out internationally. While this presents many challenges for IT, one thing Matt already has covered in having the data sitting on the company’s laptops and desktops automatically and securely backed up to the Backblaze
Highlights:
- Unlimited data for each PC or Mac backup
- Automatic scanning for files to backup
- Files secured with military-grade encryption
- Data centers are SSAE-16/SOC 2 compliant
- Flexible “business groups”
- Managed or unmanaged groups
- User or administrator data restores
- Mobile access to backups via iOS and Android devices
- Backs up Mac OS 10.8+ and Windows 7, 8, & 10 personal systems
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