Backblaze expands enterprise backup service

Backblaze, the cloud backup provider known for its quarterly reports on hard drive failures, has announced new features for its enterprise backup service. The enhancements to the vendor’s endpoint backup service for businesses focus on cyber security and ransomware protection.

The existing version of Backblaze Computer Backup has a starting cost of $9/month or $99/year and includes unlimited backups and one-year version history. The new version, Backblaze Computer Backup with Enterprise Control, adds advanced administration tools that large businesses need to protect workstations and meet cybersecurity requirements, the vendor says.

The new Enterprise Control features include:

• Fine-grained access permissions: Users can manage access to group member data on a granular level for enterprise operations, such as members’ ability to delete their own backups, admin ability to delete member backups, and admin permissions for restoring data on a member’s behalf.
• Advanced single sign-on: The new version enables OpenID Connect (OIDC) single sign-on and the ability to use tools like Okta and Azure Active Directory in addition to GSuite and Microsoft.
• Group management controls: These prevent members from leaving a group and taking data with them, or ordering restore hard drives or snapshot hard drives without permission. This will prevent group members from updating the client app on their own.
• Compliance support: New features benefit businesses that are mandated to apply greater controls given compliance, cyber insurance, or heightened recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) requirements.

Enterprise Control is available for enterprises with more than 20 Computer Backup licenses at an additional $2 per month per license.

“Backblaze Computer Backup with Enterprise Control builds on our history of providing unlimited data backup and ransomware protection for organizations large and small,” Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman said in a statement. “Whether you’re managing dozens of computers or thousands, this new feature set allows you to break free from your endpoint backup headaches so you can focus on moving your business forward.”

Hard drive failure rates

Backblaze is known for sharing reliability stats from its cloud storage infrastructure. Since 2013, it has published statistics and insights based on its hard drives, which today include more than 245,000 hard drives and SSDs in its data centers around the world.

Last year, the vendor observed a rise in hard-drive failure rates – and noted that it’s to be expected when you’re in the cloud storage business:

“Of course we’d like to see them lower, but the inescapable reality of the cloud storage business is that drives fail. Over the years, we have seen a wide range of failure rates across different manufacturers, drive models, and drive sizes. If you are not prepared for that, you will fail. As part of our preparation, we use our drive stats data as one of the many inputs into understanding our environment so we can adjust when and as we need,” wrote Andy Klein, principal cloud storage storyteller at Backblaze, in a blog post about the Q2 2023 drive stats.

“So, are we worried about the increase in drive failure rates? No, but we are not arrogant either. We’ll continue to monitor our systems, take action where needed, and share what we can with you along the way.”