IT Made Easier: Mass Deployment Update and Jamf Partnership

Oh, that new car smell.

The only thing better: that new computer smell. That is, unless you’re an IT manager routinely administering or provisioning tens or hundreds or more machines to employees of your organization—all that configuring and updating can be a slog, even with the best enterprise management tools.

Backblaze can’t help with everything. But provisioning new and existing machines for workforce endpoint backups—that should be easy. And that’s why we’ve joined Jamf’s Solution Partner Program, why we recently launched improvements to our Windows Mass Silent Installer (MSI), and why we will launch mass deployment updates for our Mac client in the coming weeks.

Taken together, these new offerings provide a step change in ease for the IT administrator tasked with safeguarding computers, servers, NAS, or Veeam data at any size of business.

NetGovern, an information governance company, adopted Backblaze Groups to manage their team’s backups. Roland Gaspar, IT Director, described the ease of use he experienced when administering backups for all employees:

“In terms of ease of deployment and the simplicity of the whole experience—from downloading the software, to enabling the service, to requesting the restore—all of that just works with Backblaze.”

The Jamf Partnership

Jamf is the standard in Apple enterprise management, so our partnership means that the thousands of admins in the Jamf ecosystem can easily use Backblaze in their backup and data protection strategies for businesses.

“Providing the tools to connect, manage, and protect Apple products, while streamlining the user experience is core to Jamf’s mission—adding Backblaze and their latest Mac deployment options to the Jamf Marketplace for Mac admins we serve is hugely helpful. We’re very excited to be deepening our collaboration with Backblaze.”—Sam Weiss, Manager, Solution Partner Program, Jamf

The Mass Deployment Upgrade

For any team administering backups for a large fleet of machines, the improvements to our mass deployment suite streamline commands for new user installs and add support for installs on existing users’ workstations when they’re replaced due to refresh policy or equipment loss.

As companies’ refresh policies increasingly require workstation replacements every four to five years, and technology companies increasingly do so more like every three years, these latest mass install improvements translate to significant time savings, fast, for IT admins.

Learn More About the Mass Deployment Upgrade Here

Update details of note:

Our MSI package now supports both signing in and creating accounts. It will handle the logic in the background to make sure the right operation is made, removing the complexity from IT admins’ scripting.

Error messages now output to stderr instead of alert windows as in the past because alert window output cannot be handled by scripts or installer tools.

Enterprise management and deployment tool users will also find these updates work with mobile device management apps including Jamf, SCCM, Group Policy, and PDQ Deploy.

Getting Started Today

Existing Backblaze Business Backup Group admins can dig in immediately. People new to Backblaze will want to first create a Backblaze Computer Backup account, then navigate to “My Settings” to enable Business Groups and invite members. More detailed information about the MSI update can also be found in our Mac documentation and Windows documentation.

Needless to say, for those of you regularly racking, stacking, and configuring many new devices, we hope you find this smells like… victory.