Backupify’s APIs for User Life Cycle Management

For many of our nearly 8,000 customers, we’re more than just backup. Sure, they initially purchased us for our market leading cloud-to-cloud backup capabilities but a huge use case for Backupify that we hear frequently from our customer base is around user life cycle management. For these customers, Backupify is a critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to onboarding new employees, keeping them protected and then managing all their data upon departure. To help with this user life cycle management process, we’ve released a user management and an export API that our Enterprise and Enterprise + customers can easily use to manage their users’ data (and of course all their users’ backups).

Here’s how it all works!

When a new employee first joins an organization, the company (using Backupify) can programmatically create a user in Google Apps (using Google’s own Directory API) and add them to Backupify without ever going through the UI. Piece of cake.

Once this new employee is up and running, our user management API provides details on the health of the user’s backups. Backupify customers can poll for a storage update, get the status of the last backup, receive dates and times of the last attempted and successful backups and learn whether or not a backup is currently in progress.

When a user is suspended or deleted in Google Apps, Backupify marks that user as “Archived” within Backupify – this means we’ll continue storing this user’s data, but new backups will not be processed.  For most customers, this is the perfect solution for maintaining departed employees data while others may have additional requirements.

For those customers with additional requirements, the user management API allows them to poll for a list of just Archived users, then using the export API, they can export the data from all of that user’s services. Once these customers have downloaded the exported data, they can remove these users from Backupify using the user management API.

There you have it. Backupify can not only back up all the crucial data in your cloud applications, it also greatly helps companies with user life cycle management.