Machinima Backs Up Office 365, Google Apps Successfully with Backupify

Machinima is a California-based digital content company that reaches over 150 million viewers each month. With a network of thousands of influencers, downtime isn’t an option for the media gaming giant. When the Director of IT, Ed Becker, joined the Machinima team in 2014, he was tasked with cleaning up the network infrastructure and migrating the company to Office 365.

Backupify for Google Apps + Office 365

Upon arriving, Becker noted that the cloud-to-cloud backup tool, Backupify, was already in place for Google Apps. As the company was transitioning to Office 365, Becker had to decide how to protect their SaaS data going forward.

Becker has been working in IT since the days of tape backup. At his more recent companies, on-premise Exchange Servers were used for backup. He described that process as being intensive in terms of labor and maintenance. Sticking with a cloud-to-cloud backup solution seemed best for Machinima.

“Going to cloud backup frees up space and money and resources. Taking things off-site is an added cost to administration. Cloud backup offers good redundancy, and there is more peace of mind as it works seamlessly in the background,” explained Becker.

Becker’s positive experience with Backupify for Google Apps served as a key factor in his decision to keep the solution in place during migration to Office 365.

“I had a chance to utilize the product on the Google Apps side and liked what I saw. The fact that Backupify was making moves forward with Office 365 was a good thing. I’ve never heard of Microsoft losing data, but user error or corruption is always a possibility, so it’s a good idea to have it in place,” explained Becker.

So far, Becker has used Backupify to assist the legal team at Machinima by being able to easily restore email accounts when data is needed.

“With Google, if you want to restore a mailbox, it’s not that easy. Backupify’s UI offers an easy to use, one-click-restore option, making it easy to find and view more granular data in a timely manner,” said Becker.

Machinima had 800 Google Apps accounts to migrate over to Office 365. Some of these accounts were left behind from previous employees. They are now down to 150 accounts on Google, keeping Backupify working in the background as a safeguard during the interim period. Eventually, Becker will keep only a handful of Google Apps accounts, migrate active users over to Office 365, and keep them backed up with Backupify.

Backupify + Google Vault

Along with Backupify, Google Vault was in place at Machinima when he joined the team. Upon evaluating the Google Vault and Backupify solutions, Becker deemed both to be of tremendous value to the company. Google Vault serves Machinima’s need for an eDiscovery tool. It’s powerful keyword searches help Becker’s team locate data currently in their system.

When it comes to sifting through data that has been deleted or lost, Backupify’s recovery and restore capabilities give Machinima complete control over their data. Together, Google Vault and Backupify keep Machinima’s data both accessible and recoverable. Rather than choosing to keep one tool over the other, Becker chose to keep both.

As the transition to Office 365 continues, Machinima can count on Backupify to protect more than just their mailboxes. Going forward, the company will be leveraging Backupify for Office 365, which includes daily, automated backups for both OneDrive and SharePoint. When it comes to data protection, Machinima refuses to play games.

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