Protecting Employee Laptops Around the Globe

Considering that charity: water sends workers with laptop computers to rural communities in 29 countries around the world, it’s not surprising that computer backup is needed on every computer they have. It’s so essential, in fact, that Matt Ward, System Administrator for charity: water, says it’s a standard part of employee on-boarding.

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charity: water, based in New York City, is a nonprofit organization that is working to bring clean water to the nearly one in ten people around the world who live without it, a situation that affects not only health, but education and income. The organization was founded in 2006 and has funded 111,709 projects in 29 countries, benefiting over 15.4 million people.

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“We have people constantly traveling all over the world,” Ward said. “So a cloud-based service makes sense whether the user is in New York or Malawi. Most of our projects and beneficiaries are in Sub Saharan Africa and Southern/Southeast Asia, such as Ethiopia, Rwanda, Cambodia, and Nepal.”

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A Mission to Solve the Water Crisis Worldwide

To achieve their mission, charity: water works with organizations that have years of experience building sustainable, community-owned water projects on the ground in the countries where they operate. charity: water team members travel to the communities where safe water is scarce or distant and meet with their local partner organizations who are implementing the water projects. 

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The people in these communities must spend hours every day walking to collect water for their families—a task typically done by women and children. It’s a losing proposition, as the time they spend walking takes away from education, earning money, and generally limits the opportunities for improving their lives. On top of that, the water often carries diseases that affect everyone in the community.

Helping a Small Team Achieve Big Things

charity: water began using Backblaze Business Backup before Ward came on a year ago. They started with a few licenses, but quickly decided to deploy Backblaze to every computer in the organization. charity: water has about 80 staff computer users, and adds ten to 20 interns each season. Each staff member or intern has at least one computer. “Our IT department is two people, me and my director,” explains Ward, “and we have to support everyone, so it’s valuable to us that Backblaze is super simple to deploy.”

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Easy deployment helps the small team make sure every computer is protected, and even easier restores help the team react quickly when laptops go missing. “We’ve lost computers plenty of times,” he says, “but, because of Backblaze, there’s never been a case where we lost a computer’s data.” Ward explains that if a computer is lost he will even remotely wipe the computer knowing that all the data is safe in the Backblaze cloud. He can immediately deploy a replacement computer using the data restored from Backblaze or have the restore data ready to put back on the same computer after it’s been recovered or repaired. 

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Ward frequently uses Backblaze to off-board users, which can be a big, recurring task with 10 to 20 interns cycling off at the end of the season. He starts a restore through the Backblaze admin console even before he has the actual computer. “I know I have a reliable archive in the restore from Backblaze, and it’s easier than doing it directly from the laptop,” he explained.

 
The ability to go back and select a previous version of a file is also a popular feature for Ward. “It’s really awesome to be able to restore a previous version of a file, say from 2pm the previous day. I show that to the user and they get it right away and are reassured that their work is saved,” he said.

Backblaze Groups Functionality Keeps Admin Tasks Flowing

Ward is an enthusiastic user of the features designed for business users, especially the Backblaze Groups feature, which has enabled charity: water to centralize billing and computer management for their worldwide team. Businesses can create groups to cluster job functions, employee locations, or any other criteria.

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Groups can be managed or unmanaged, with rules and privileges set at the Group level. charity: water uses managed Groups, which enables the IT team to act on behalf of any user and gives Ward the ability to create data restores for individual team members. Just as easily, Ward could create an unmanaged group, where IT would have no access to the individual computers. 

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Businesses find this functionality useful for backing up departments with different data privacy requirements, such as HR. “It saves me time to be able to see the status of any user’s backups, such as the last time the data was backed up,” Ward said. Before Backblaze, charity: water was writing documentation for workers, hoping they would follow backup protocols. Ward knows what’s going on in real time—a valuable feature when the laptops are dispersed around the world.

Bringing the Mission Closer to Reality

With easy deployment, fast restores, and centralized administration, the small IT team at charity:water can focus on supporting staff and advancing the mission rather than spending time tending to backups. Staff in the field aren’t slowed down waiting to restore a deleted file, and they can get back up and running quickly in the unfortunate event a laptop gets lost or damaged. For a small IT team serving a large organization that’s pursuing a big goal—bringing clean and safe water to people around the globe—it’s an essential resource.

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