App Awareness Month – Spanning Backup

This post is part of App Awareness, our month-long series where we spotlight a different Google Apps Marketplace application every day in April. This week we’re focusing on admin tools that help make Google Apps domain administrators’ lives easier! The applications we chose to highlight demonstrate excellent integration with Google Apps, and we either use and love the product or know a lot of other people who do. Have a favorite Marketplace app of your own? Tweet it to @bettercloud.

Spanning Backup – Business Class Cloud-to-Cloud Backup

If you’ve ever inadvertently deleted an important Google Doc or email, or worse, a disgruntled employee intentionally deleted an asset,  you’ll definitely appreciate Spanning Backup, the highest rated backup system for Google Apps and a member of the Cloud Alliance for Google Apps.

If you’re unfamiliar with how Google Apps works, you may be asking yourself ‘Doesn’t Google already back up my data?” – Google is only able to recover data that is lost in a disaster directly affecting Google (like a fire at a datacenter). So if something goes wrong on your end or an employee purposely destroys data, Google can’t restore the lost files. Installing a backup system like Spanning gives admins and end-users peace-of-mind.

Spanning works by continuously backing up data created in Gmail, Docs, Calendars, Folders and even contacts to the cloud and subsequently retrieving and restoring lost data in seconds. Plus with unlimited storage and 99.9% uptime, your important business documents are well-protected.

Google Apps Integration

Spanning Backup integrates with nearly every feature of Google Apps – Calendar, Contacts, Docs and Email – to create the most comprehensive and reliable backups. Maybe you’ve seen Spanning’s t-shirts that say “Spanning Saved My _____.” Well, you can insert pretty much any part of the Google Apps suite into that sentence, Spanning leaves nothing behind.

Spanning also includes ‘Metadata Backup,’ which backs up and restores nested folders, sharing and permissions settings, contact photos and more. So Spanning has basically every area of Google Apps covered if an item goes missing.

Why We Like It

Spanning’s per-file versioning only transfers data updated or created since the last backup, which means like Google Docs’ ‘revision history,’ Spanning users can restore assets to any previous known-good state. And in addition to automated backups, Spanning allows users to backup information on-demand. Plus dozens of satisfied customers love how easy Spanning is to use!

Spanning is available for $2.50 per user/month in the Google Apps Marketplace or to test it out, install the free 14-day trial.

Stay tuned for more of our favorite Apps in the Google Apps Marketplace!

Can you guess tomorrow’s app?
Hint: This tool facilitates cloud to cloud migrations.

About App Awareness Month

At BetterCloud, we’ve seen first hand the impact Google Apps can have on a business: extreme cost cutting, streamlined management processes, enhanced collaboration and mobility and much more.

During our time as an independent software provider focused 100% on the Google Apps platform, we’ve interacted with thousands of organizations using Google Apps and we’ve discovered one common trend: knowledge and awareness of third-party applications that extend and enhance Google Apps is extremely limited.

This April, we’re devoting the BetterCloud blog to educating Google Apps users on the wide array of applications available for Google Apps today. These products not only enhance native Google Apps functionalities, but bring a diverse range of services from CRM, to expense management, process and systems management and more to your Google Apps environment. More importantly, adding these applications to Google Apps allows you to retire expensive legacy software licenses and creates a more cohesive organization.

Disclaimer: The companies appearing in this month-long series have not been contacted nor consulted regarding their inclusion. Our choices are based solely on reader suggestions and our experiences with the applications.