Foojee
Apple Managed Services Provider Gets Easy Deployment and Mac-Native Reliability at Scale
Foojee
Lucas Acosta
CEO, Foojee
endpoints
false positives
hrs saved onboarding new clients
Foojee, a managed services provider (MSP), used CrashPlan to back up client endpoints for years, despite having to work around frustrating deployment and performance issues, lost files, timeouts, and other challenges. When Foojee realized they’d have to migrate to a new version of CrashPlan, they took it as an opportunity to seek out a better solution for the Macs that they manage.
The Foojee team found Backblaze Computer Backup with Enterprise Control, migrated around 500 endpoints, and saw immediate benefits. Client onboarding went from around 15 minutes per user to virtually zero using Kandji, a device management tool. And, since Backblaze is built as a lightweight, native Mac app, it operated seamlessly, gave them improved reliability, and eliminated the security concerns and timeouts they were previously experiencing.
Prior to Backblaze, about 11% of the Help Desk tickets the Foojee team received were related to backup issues, many of them false positives. With Backblaze, false positives have dropped to zero. Deployments for large customers, which used to take up to 50+ hours, are now finished in minutes. Files are easy to find, and are reliably backed up without issue. Plus, the Foojee team knows they can get direct support from Backblaze Sales and Engineering teams should they need it.
Foojee is an MSP that serves as “The Apple IT department built for small business,” providing Apple IT support, including security, data management, and device monitoring.
As the Help Desk inbox dinged with another restore request from a client, Jeremy Price, Director of Operations for Foojee, cringed. He was never completely sure the file was going to be there. Foojee had used CrashPlan for many years to back up endpoints for their customers—mostly small businesses of five to 200 people in industries like legal, financial, healthcare, and real estate. CrashPlan had met their needs, but frustrations were mounting—deployments were manual and time consuming, the app clogged up system resources, processes timed out without warning, and backups were sometimes incomplete.
We saw more installation issues than we wanted with CrashPlan. It also has an operational issue with rogue files not being backed up.
Lucas Acosta, CEO, Foojee
Foojee founder and CEO, Lucas Acosta, collaborated with Price to find workarounds to deal with the issues, but they wanted to step up security for their clients by implementing single sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA). Making this change would require a migration to a new CrashPlan version. Once Foojee knew they would have to do a serious migration anyway, they took the opportunity to look at other options.
The Foojee team knew of Backblaze, and knew that Backblaze Computer Backup was a fully native Mac app, which gave them 10x efficiency by having an app size of just around 50MB compared to their previous backup application. After testing the service, they had zero issues, so they migrated approximately 500 endpoints to Backblaze. They also appreciated that both the Backblaze local app and restore process were simpler and more reliable.
As far as the move to Backblaze, I feel more supported. We know more faces at Backblaze already than we ever knew at CrashPlan even after many years.
Lucas Acosta, CEO, Foojee
With the version of CrashPlan Foojee was using, they had to manually deploy backup software to every new user just to start onboarding, a 15 minute process. With Backblaze, Foojee can deploy at scale using Kandji, a device management tool. The ease of deployment has been game changing for the Foojee team, allowing them to automate onboarding and saving countless hours of time.
The team estimated around 11% of Foojee’s Help Desk ticket volume was related to backup under CrashPlan, and they never knew if the issue was real or a false positive. With Backblaze, false positives are a thing of the past. The dedicated Backblaze restore app makes restores more reliable, the native Mac client makes operations smooth, and deployments are a breeze. Instead of cringing when a ticket comes in, the team at Foojee can now breathe a collective sigh of relief.
Being able to zero-touch deploy to our entire customer fleet is a godsend and saves us countless hours of work—it’s huge. And the native Mac app doesn’t slow down the onboarding experience.
Luis Acosta, founder and CEO Foojee
Kandji is an Apple device management and security platform that empowers secure and productive global work. With Kandji, Apple devices transform themselves into enterprise-ready endpoints, with all the right apps, settings, and security systems in place.
