We know that business users sometimes ask, “Why can’t business software be as easy to use as consumer software?”
At Backblaze, we believe it can be.
We started our business to make backup easier for everyone, knowing that the primary reason why people don’t back up is that it is too complicated and too intimidating.
Backblaze has spent the last decade building an unlimited, inexpensive, and, best of all, easy to use backup service. We designed it from the ground up, with the goal of making it a simple service—one that “just works.” We wanted it to be the easiest backup solution for grandmothers and IT administrators alike.
Having a product that’s intuitive and easy makes it ideal for people that don’t want to fret about backing up or worrying about whether or not they selected the right files when their backup system was set up. Backblaze backs up all user data by default so there’s no worrying about missing something. What that means is when you use Backblaze Business Backup, you’re getting a solution that works out of the box not just for the end user, but also for the account administrator.
Design for Enterprise Scalability But With Consumer Simplicity
Often times when a product is designed “for enterprise” the result can be an unintuitive piece of software that only the systems administrators can navigate. While that may be acceptable for antivirus or anti-spam software, there are many products and services that should not require hours to learn to use. Some of the most common services that businesses use today are known for their ease of use. Dropbox Sync, Trello, and Slack come to mind.
Backblaze Computer Backup is much the same. Regardless of whether you have one computer or are deploying to an organization of 1,000, Backblaze scales so that you and all your users get the same, simple service that backs up and makes data accessible.
Overcomplexity Reduces Efficiency
The last thing an IT professional wants is users asking them how a program on their computer works, or complaining about a process that’s supposed to be running in the background. The more bloated and over-designed products and services get, the more stumbling blocks appear before the end user. When you’re developing a product, there’s a fine line between adding features and creating an overwhelmingly complicated user interface. The cost of getting that balance wrong is that it will raise more questions than it provides answers, leaving customers and end users confused with too many choices. Many of the players in the online backup space have made confusing design choices that leave customers perplexed. We believe easy is better for everyone.
Backblaze Business Backup is built on top of our award-winning Computer Backup product that has been in market for over 10 years. We have over 350PB under storage and have helped users save over 23 BILLION files. We know a lot about backup.
But businesses have unique needs, such as centralized user management and billing, reporting, monitoring usage, and the ability to act on behalf of any user. When an end user (or the IT admin) installs Backblaze, the backup starts automatically, backing up all the user data on the machine. There’s no need to select files or folders. The backup process just starts, because all of the data is important. We’ve heard time and time again that a user’s files were saved because we backed up an obscure directory where one or two important files would have been forgotten about had the user been forced to choose what to back up.
Backblaze Just Works—for Everyone
The best products are the ones that don’t impede your workflow and work seamlessly with the processes you have in place, which is another reason having something designed with the end user in mind is helpful. You build software that is aware of its environment (not everyone has top of the line computing systems) and stays out of the way.
Making sure that people are diligent about their backup strategy is hard enough. At Backblaze we believe that simplicity is key, and that’s why we designed a backup service that scales from one to 10,000—without having to change a setting.
