Backing up Buckeyes: Enterprise Endpoint Backup in an Evolving-BYOD, Customer-centric IT Culture

Protecting and migrating the data on the OSU Department of Mathematics’ student and faculty endpoints used to be a lasting headache for our IT group. When I arrived, we were relying on file-server backup and Apple’s Time Machine to provide data-loss protection, but this combination couldn’t provide the lean, enterprise-level endpoint backup that our device-active users required.

I turned to CrashPlan enterprise endpoint backup to protect sensitive research, student-data, and other data produced and stored on faculty, staff, and grad-student endpoints. Most importantly, this solution provided a necessary transition to an easy self-service approach to backups and restores for the end user.

I experienced the power of CrashPlan’s restore capabilities first-hand a few years ago, when a hard drive crash on my personal computer nearly wiped out an entire collection of baby photos of my two kids. CrashPlan was so seamless that I’d forgotten it was even running on the machine, and thankfully the pictures were all right there in the cloud, just waiting for me to download them!

After that experience, I attended some industry events where other IT managers were sharing their experiences with CrashPlan’s ability to solve large-scale file server issues. I liked what I heard, so I pursued the idea of “backing up the Buckeyes” with CrashPlan.

CrashPlan’s cross-platform capabilities eliminated our concerns about finding a backup solution that works for both Mac, Linux, and Windows operating systems. It’s one piece of software and one interface that’s easily deployable and easily scriptable, which fits well into our LEAN initiative. The admin screen provides visibility into who’s backed up, the ability to lock down clients and monitor where machines are.

The desktop team loves the fact that it takes just two or three minutes to set up a user with CrashPlan. It’s not hard at all—we can even send student-staff to set up the software. It easily integrates with Active Directory, and the interface is smooth and intuitive. It doesn’t take time or tech training, and I don’t need to be the expert in backup. An added bonus is that CrashPlan plugs right into our JAMF Software Casper Suite reporting—which saves us time and money. CrashPlan has dropped the number of tickets the support team receives down to near nothing; in fact, I can't tell you the last time support received a file-restore request ticket. But I can tell you our users are using the product, including restores, on a daily basis.

Here’s an illustration of CrashPlan’s outstanding disaster recovery capabilities: When a prominent faculty member’s computer hard drive failed during a business trip to South America, she used the CrashPlan mobile app on her iPhone to easily and remotely access all of her sensitive research data from a private cloud—and gave the presentation directly from her phone! She not only saved months of mission-critical work, she saved the university thousands of dollars in travel costs.

CrashPlan has been so successful, and has scaled so well for my users, that OSU is exploring expansion across the entire college of arts and sciences—a total of more than 50,000 devices.