Japan Society
Japan Society Switches From Low Cost Hosted Provider to BUMI (Backup My Info!)
SUPERIOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT KEEPS EMAIL-DEPENDENT NONPROFIT HAPPY
Japan Society

"You can use any company to backup. The key question is how quickly can you restore it? With BUMI if we lose something, even a single email or calendar entry, we can retrieve it quickly."
Larry Kong
IT Director
Japan Society

"The software is the software. It's the people who answer the phone when you need help that really make the difference. BUMI technical support people don't act like techs, they act like people who really want to help you."
Larry Kong
IT Director
Japan Society

The Challenge

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The Japan Society is an American nonprofit organization which fosters understanding and relationships between Japan and the United States. Founded more than 100 years ago, the Japan Society is a world-class, multidisciplinary hub for global leaders, artists, scholars, and educators. With almost 60 employees and volunteers who organize more than 100 events each year, the reliability of the Society's communication system is critical to their success. "Our organization depends a lot on email," says Larry Kong, IT Director, Japan Society.

When Kong joined the Japan Society in 2007, the nonprofit was using ARCserve to backup their emails, an archaic tape-based system that took a long time to backup and was not easy to restore. Kong had been an IT consultant before joining the Japan Society and had a client that used BUMI (Backup My Info!) as their hosted backup solution. He convinced the leadership of Japan Society to give it a try. The nonprofit was very happy with BUMI but when the economic downturn hit in 2008, the Society switched to a lower priced offer from EVault to backup their email. Kong was on a 14-month deployment in Iraq as a member of the U.S. Military at the time. "When I came back in 2009 I found a big problem with the restoring process," Kong remembers. "The best EVault could do was restore by an entire day, not by sender or subject. This was not a good solution for people who get a lot of email each day."

The Solution

Kong convinced the management team to return to BUMI. "When we started using BUMI again the difference was immediately apparent" Kong said. "If we lost an email or calendar entry we could now retrieve it quickly and easily."

Kong also found both the system and the customer support team to be extremely user-friendly. He can do all email backup himself or can call on the BUMI tech support team.

The Results

"On a scale of one to 10, I'd give BUMI a 20," says Kong. Email-dependent employees of the Japan Society have greatly benefited from the level of detail and ease of message and calendar restores. The president of the Society learned the value of the BUMI backup system firsthand when he lost an important calendar entry and the IT department was able to restore it in just 15 minutes.

Kong has also been impressed by the ability and friendliness of customer support. "I've been around IT support a long time and the BUMI technical support team really knows what they are talking about," he says. "The tech support people at a lot of the larger firms are not friendly, and it might take 10 calls to get somebody to help you. With BUMI, it's just one call. As long as BUMI keeps hiring people that know what they're doing, it will continue to be better than going with a low cost provider."

The Japan Society builds relationships and brings people together. But they couldn't do it without reliable communications and a dependable backup system for the emails that are so vital to their business. "We don't lose a lot of things," says Kong. "But when we do, the BUMI hosted backup system is a real lifesaver."