A Recipe for SaaS Success

Boston-based America’s Test Kitchen (ATK), is literally cooking up new ideas each day. The test kitchen cultivates new recipes, which are then published in magazines, on their website, and on their television series. ATK’s rapid growth has driven internal headcount to over 200 employees. No one feels this growth more than their internal IT team.

When Dustin Brandt, Director of IT, joined the team, the company was leveraging Google Apps for work but without a backup and recovery solution in place. Departments were constantly challenged with off-boarding issues and managers struggled to recover key documents from the deactivated Google Apps accounts of departed employees.

Another pain point? When a newly married employee would change their work email to reflect their new surname, Google’s directory would no longer recognize them as owner of said account and they would become new users, preventing access to their ‘old’ mailboxes.

What may appear to be a minor issue would cost the IT and management teams valuable time at ATK. Brandt decided that a change was in order. He began to research cloud-to-cloud backup options.

It came down to Google Vault and Backupify for their Google Apps backup needs. When comparing the two, Brandt noted some immediate differences. Price-wise, Vault was more expensive for the number of users Brandt needed to support. As a company that surpassed their annual growth goal halfway through the year, this option could put a serious dent in the IT budget. Brandt decided to move forward with a Vault trial anyway and while the eDiscovery ability it offered was helpful, he was still concerned about inactive users taking up licenses.

With Backupify for Google Apps, Brandt could seamlessly export Google Apps account data, restore it, and migrate large volumes of data to other users. Transferring entire mailboxes wasn’t an option in Vault. Backupify could restore a user’s mailbox to a manager and then cancel the license; saving the managers time from logging into various accounts and saving the company money on inactive licenses.

With Backupify, the active directory issue was also solved. Users who change their names are still recognized as ‘new’, but Brandt is able to restore their ‘old’ mailbox to them as soon as the change occurs. Backupify covers the eDiscovery needs present today at ATK. They are confident in Backupify’s search capabilities and frequently use the search function to find specific data.

Brandt further expressed how easy it has been to use Backupify. No special administration or overhead maintenance has been required and it’s saved him and other employees a lot of time.

“Working with Backupify for the last year, I can say there has been virtually no learning curve. It checks off a lot of boxes for us and I’ve been able to intuitively use it on a daily basis,” said Brandt.

So far, sprinkling Backupify into the mix at America’s Test Kitchen has been a recipe for success for their IT team.

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