SET Creative Ditches Google Vault for Datto Backupify

The team at SET Creative works each day to bring companies to life in stores and at events. The global brand experience agency has been raising the stakes in visual retail design since 2009. Since opening, the Oregon-based company has grown to over one hundred employees and opened offices in London and Amsterdam.

With such rapid expansion, Global IT manager Jake Kienholz is constantly working to improve the company’s IT infrastructure, ensuring it is functional, accessible, and user friendly for employees at every location.

When Kienholz first started at SET, the staff was using Microsoft Outlook for email with no form of data backup. It became apparent that something needed to change as the staff was often burdened with trying to recover emails from departed employees. Kienholz transitioned the team to Google’s Gmail and implemented Google Vault for backup purposes.

While SET employees quickly adjusted to Gmail, which many use for personal email, the same could not be said for Google Vault.

“Unlike most Google products, Vault was not user friendly at all. It’s very hard to search for items. We never really figured out how to do a restore either,” explained Kienholz.

Due to SET’s work with high-profile brands, projects often go through many rounds of revisions right down to the eleventh hour. This means that every bit of information – especially data living in project managers’ emails – is crucial to delivering clients a polished design at deadline.

While exploring different backup options, Kienholz discovered Datto’s Backupify product and was immediately taken back by the user friendly interface.

“People are used to Gmail and when they have that familiarity, Backupify is nice because it gives them that same searchability look and feel,” explained Kienholz.

The accessible interface wasn’t the only Backupify feature that was well-received at SET Creative. Before Backupify, they had been keeping the Google licensing for each user, even after they had left. This method proved to be financially wasteful. With Backupify, they began holding onto a user’s license for just 30 days after their departure, giving Kienholz enough time to restore the user’s account to someone else on the team who may need the information stored there.

With Datto Backupify, Kienholz now has an easy-to-use backup and restore solution that can support SET Creative as they continue to grow. An added plus for Kienholz is the assistance of Datto’s Customer Success team. The team, offering 24/7/365 support, walked Kienholz through a seamless onboarding experience.