In 2017, we relaunched our Business Backup platform with a focus on providing administrators better tools for managing their teams. We’ve been busy enhancing the platform since the addition of Groups and thought we’d take a moment to review some of our latest enhancements.
The most recent is our support of Single Sign-On (SSO) using G Suite by Google Cloud. This has been one of our most requested features and we’re happy to be able to launch it today.
SSO Support for Groups
Effective immediately, SSO via G Suite is available for all Groups. There is no fee for turning on SSO or for creating a Group.
We created our Business Backup platform to help make managing your team’s backups easier. Whether your team is inside your household or a globally distributed workforce like charity: water (or somewhere in between), we want to make the process of getting your data backed up astonishingly easy and affordable.
As your team uses more and more software-based solutions, the challenge of managing all the logins gets more difficult. And as your team grows, so do the security issues. In addition, the simple act of administering the services can get complex. Administrators want to know they can onboard and offboard easily and efficiently.
SSO can be enabled for a specific Group, a collection of Groups, or all of your Groups. The flexibility, coupled with the ability to control access privileges at a Group level, provides administrators more tools to accomplish their goals.
You can enable SSO for your Groups inside of your preferences panel where you control all of your Group level customizations.
Groups Preferences Pane — Enable SSO
For more detail & FAQs, please visit our Knowledge Base article on Enabling Single Sign-On (SSO) In Backblaze Groups.
With the addition of SSO, we provide one more tool to manage your teams as you wish. With this roll out we are supporting G Suite based credentials. In Q1 of 2019, we’ll add support for organizations using Office365 credentials.
Mass Install with Microsoft Group Policy & SCCM
Another set of challenges for administrators is the deployment of software. Most users would prefer if their IT team simply “took care of everything.” For the user, a glorious world of having your machine updated and working flawlessly is great. For anyone who’s been in the IT Admin role, you know that things aren’t quite that simple.
Many administrators seek what’s known as Mass Silent Install (MSI). This allows the deployment of software without any end user interaction. Some do the scripting themselves, while others use Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) tools. We recently added SCCM support to our existing list of MSI options.
We are constantly striving to make getting your data backed up as easy as possible, and adding SSO is another strong step in that direction.
