A Recipe for Saas Success

When Dustin Brandt, ATK Director of IT, joined the team, the company was leveraging Google Apps for work but without a backup and recovery solution in place. Departments were constantly challenged with off-boarding issues and managers struggled to recover key documents from the deactivated Google Apps accounts of departed employees. Another pain point? When a newly married employee would change their work email to reflect their new surname, Google’s directory would no longer recognize them as owner of said account and they would become new users, preventing access to their ‘old’ mailboxes. What may appear to be smaller issues have cost the IT and management teams valuable time at ATK. Brandt decided that a change was in order. He began to research cloud-to cloud backup options. It came down to Google Vault and Backupify for their Google Apps backup needs. When comparing the two, Brandt noted some immediate differences. Price-wise, Vault was more expensive for the number of users Brandt needed to support. As a company that surpassed their annual growth goal halfway through the year, this option could put a serious dent in the IT budget. Brandt decided to move forward with a Vault trial anyway and while the eDiscovery ability it offered was helpful, he was still concerned about inactive users taking up licenses.

Boston-based America’s Test Kitchen (ATK), is literally cooking up new ideas each day. The test kitchen cultivates new recipes, which are then published in magazines, on their website, and on their television series. ATK’s rapid growth has driven internal headcount to 200+ employees. No one feels this growth more than their internal IT team.