Roush Auto Group
How One Car Dealership Group Uses Backup as a Defense Against Cyberattacks
Roush Auto Group
Ed Green
IT Director, Roush Auto Group
Employees Backed Up
Centralized Bill
Data Loss
Roush Auto Group needed reliable, affordable cloud backups for their staff of 350 employees and growing. On-site backups had long been part of their IT and business continuity strategy, but they wanted to add cloud backups to keep a copy of their data off-site and geographically separated for protection against unexpected events and cyber threats.
Roush implemented Backblaze Business Backup to protect employee endpoints by backing data up to the cloud. They use the Groups feature to administer users and check backup statuses for all of their machines as well as to manage billing centrally.
The Roush Auto Group includes Roush Honda in Westerville, Ohio and Roush Ford in Hillard, Ohio. Roush Honda started in 1965 as a family business and later became 100% employee owned. It’s now one of the Midwest’s largest volume Honda dealerships. Roush Ford was added in January of 2017.
Ed Green, IT Director at Roush Auto Group, noticed a big increase in the number of attacks on IT resources in recent years. Those attacks include phishing exploits, spam, and malicious scripts trying to enter the workplace through email, downloads, and direct attacks on servers. That’s why Green added Backblaze Business Backup to keep data secure at Roush.
Over a year ago Green started looking for a cloud-based backup solution that would provide additional security beyond just on-site backups. Local backups have been a standard part of Roush’s IT and business contingency strategy for a while, but Green wanted to add backups to the cloud as well. Cloud backups provide that extra peace-of-mind that comes with knowing that even if something happened to the on-site systems, the cloud backups would help them get back to work as soon as possible.
“The Groups management feature is easy to use, and I can quickly see how many licenses we have allocated and how many remain.”
Ed Green, IT Director, Roush Auto Group
“The Groups management feature is easy to use, and I can quickly see how many licenses we have allocated and how many remain. The backups themselves are easy to manage. In fact, they pretty much take care of themselves. It’s all done automatically,” Green said.
It’s not just phishing and malware that concerns him. It’s those unexpected events. Green recalls the time that a water sprinkler line broke and soaked the desktop computers in their office. “That was definitely unexpected,” said Green. “Events like that are the reason we do backups. You don’t know when something like that is going to happen. When it does, you’re glad you planned ahead.”
There was another time that a VBS script downloaded a virus that infected computer systems. Other than that, they’ve had the usual hard drive failures and lost computers. Backup just makes sense for any business that doesn’t want to get shut down when bad things happen.
Green did a lot of research investigating what the best solution would be for cloud backups. He wanted something that was easy to use, with set-it-and-forget-it features and reliability. He sat down with Roush’s CFO and after their meeting, affordability was added to the list of requirements as well. In Business Backup, they found a solution that ticked all of their boxes, and then some, including:
"Backblaze Business Backup is a very, very convenient and effective tool for us. Backblaze covers our entire spectrum of needs for business backup.”
Ed Green, IT Director, Roush Auto Group
With 350 employees and plans to hire more people at Roush Auto Group, Green believes he’ll be adding more Backblaze licenses, likely doubling in the next quarter. He uses the Groups features of Backblaze Business Backup to administer users and make sure that computers are backed up. He can perform restores on any machine and even install Backblaze remotely on new Macs and Windows for the company.
Green also likes the user interface of Backblaze Business Backup. “It’s clear and easy to use,” he says.“Backblaze Business Backup is a very, very convenient and effective tool for us. Backblaze covers our entire spectrum of needs for business backup.”
