ATLANTA—At Crisp Video Group, we got our feet wet creating award-winning content with the likes of Coca-Cola, Audi, Verizon, Coldwell Banker and RedBull. However, we found that for creative agencies, specialization leads to greater success. So we made a strategic decision to focus on a market niche where there was an aching need. And surprisingly enough that was video marketing for law firms.
We were already working with attorneys in the Atlanta area, telling their stories like we had for other clients. We quickly learned that we got much better results when we broke away from the stereotypical “tough guy” lawyer persona and humanized them by showing their kindness and their connection to the community. Today, legal professionals who work with Crisp Video typically double and triple their revenue—sometimes within just six months, by consistently attracting and retaining higher-value cases.
We have the same goal for ourselves as for our clients—pushing fast, consistent and unreasonable growth. Since we were founded seven years ago, Crisp Video Group has expanded in virtually every facet of our business. Naturally, our business growth has translated directly to growth in the amount of content we have to manage.
DUE DILIGENCE
When I became responsible for our video workflow four years ago, we were in the process of upgrading our production server to increase capacity. We were backing the server up to Amazon S3—or so we thought. I checked on the backups and found that data hadn’t been backed up for 109 days! We were scrambling to locate all our end client data—finding it wherever we could, including the recycle bin (which thankfully hadn’t been emptied yet). This could never happen again. Our clients return to us for new marketing programs and we need to be absolutely certain we can access all our previous work.
We chose the Studio Network Solutions (SNS) software and shared media storage for our main server. Our backup requirements were straightforward: easy to use, automatic and not too expensive. We considered continuing with Amazon S3, but then we found Backblaze.
At the time, our production server was under 50 TB. Pricing that out with Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Google, and other cloud storage providers, we found that Backblaze B2 would cost us four figures, while every other solution would cost well over five figures. We then did the math for our costs at 100 TB and beyond—we’re planning for “unreasonable growth,” after all—and not only was the cost for storing data dramatically lower with B2, but the retrieval costs were dramatically lower as well. We briefly considered tape, but knew it would be labor intensive. We wanted a backup solution that was “set it and forget it.” We wanted cloud.
WE REST OUR CASE
The transition into Backblaze was seamless. We tied it to the new server rollout that took place over a weekend. Come Monday morning, all content needed was available and ready for our editors on the new server. And, that night, our new server automatically backed up to B2 without a hitch.
Our Backblaze account represents more than just backups of active projects. It also serves as our long-term archive of raw footage and completed projects that have been removed from our production server. As our business has grown, our archive has only grown larger, and all our content needs to be accessible indefinitely. We are at 400–500 TB today.
With Backblaze, we have unlimited and affordable cloud backup that we can trust will always be there. That means we can stay focused on telling our clients’ stories, not managing their data.
Mike McMullan is director of content/production at Crisp Video Group, a premium video marketing agency focused on attorneys and law firms based in Atlanta. For more information, visitcrispvideo.com.
For more information, visitwww.backblaze.com.
