Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System) is an agile development product that is an extension of the Microsoft Visual Studio architecture. Azure DevOps includes software development, collaboration, and reporting capabilities.
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
Keepit
Score 9.4 out of 10
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The Keepit platform, from the company of the same name in Copenhagen, is a solution that protects cloud data, boasting simple deployment and restore options that enable users to recover historic data. The Keepit platform supports any Cloud Workload and offers full retention on the user's terms from one year to eternity. It features indexing and search to ensure users have a complete view of data. The solution features supports Microsoft Office 365, Dynamics 365, Google Workspace, and…
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Pricing
Azure DevOps
Keepit
Editions & Modules
Azure Artifacts
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
Basic Plan
$6
per user per month (first 5 users free)
Azure Pipelines - Self-Hosted
$15
per extra parallel job (1 free parallel job with unlimited minutes)
Azure Pipelines - Microsoft Hosted
$40
per parallel job (1,800 minutes free with 1 free parallel job)
Azure DevOps works well when you’ve got larger delivery efforts with multiple teams and a lot of moving parts, and you need one place to plan work, track it properly, and see how everything links together. It’s especially useful when delivery and development are closely tied and you want backlog items, code and releases connected rather than spread across tools. Where it’s less of a fit is for small teams or simple pieces of work, as it can feel like more setup and process than you really need, and non-technical users often struggle with the interface. It also isn’t great if you want instant, easy programme-level views or a very visual planning experience without putting time into configuration.
We originally purchased Keepit for Microsoft 365 backups, but quickly added the Entra ID Advanced license to extend protection to our cloud identities. We soon found the product very effective, especially with cross-tenant restores, which makes M&A work much easier. We also used it to recover deleted users and Intune policies after an admin error, restoring access and settings quickly without data loss.
I did mention it has good visibility in terms of linking, but sometimes items do get lost, so if there was a better way to manage that, that would be great.
The wiki is not the prettiest thing to look at, so it could have refinements there.
Providing more information on an ongoing restore job. Once you begin a restore or a data import, it seems to be impossible to see which user account that job is tied to.
Its job percentages seem to be drastically inaccurate. It will say a job is 76% complete even though it has only restored 484MB of 8GB - but this is just a little annoying and not a real problem.
I don't think our organization will stray from using VSTS/TFS as we are now looking to upgrade to the 2012 version. Since our business is software development and we want to meet the requirements of CMMI to deliver consistent and high quality software, this SDLC management tool is here to stay. In addition, our company uses a lot of Microsoft products, such as Office 365, Asp.net, etc, and since VSTS/TFS has proved itself invaluable to our own processes and is within the Microsoft family of products, we will continue to use VSTS/TFS for a long, long time.
Keepit is an awesome product that garantees a result with a simple interface, and a quick configuration integration. Nowadays the service is really good and all requests have been replied to very quickly, and that´s important for our satisfaction. The possibility of multiple points recovery is a plus as well.
It's a great help to get more information about new feature release and stay updated on what the dev team is working on. I like how easy it is to just login and read through the work items. Each work item has basic details: Title, Description, Assigned to, State, Area (what it belongs to), and iteration (when it’s worked on). See image above.They move through different states (New → Discovery → Ready for Prod → etc.).
Such a simple solution to use. User friendly, intuitive, processes can be completed in minutes instead of hours with restoring from tape, and requesting the return of tapes from the off site location, thus saving many hours and cost of storage. Also gives the end user a better experience as files can be restored almost immediately.
When we've had issues, both Microsoft support and the user community have been very responsive. DevOps has an active developer community and frankly, you can find most of your questions already asked and answered there. Microsoft also does a better job than most software vendors I've worked with creating detailed and frequently updated documentation.
Support helped us to set up SSO and MFA with our Azure AD Accounts. Once when the backup was failing, they could help us to investigate the reason and find a stale account that was preventing the backup. They are really concerned that the backup works and not only want to close the ticket like other support hotlines.
The communication from KeepIT was on point, we did the implementation based on very little information as it was so easy to deploy, yet super powerful, it is a great tool.
Microsoft Planner is used by project managers and IT service managers across our organization for task tracking and running their team meetings. Azure DevOps works better than Planner for software development teams but might possibly be too complex for non-software teams or more business-focused projects. We also use ServiceNow for IT service management and this tool provides better analysis and tracking of IT incidents, as Azure DevOps is more suited to development and project work for dev teams.
We previously used Veeam to backup data from O365 to local servers. We had other SaaS platforms we needed to include and move from local to cloud backups. While Veeam does have multiple cloud options but compared with Keepit it was overly complicated and less cost effective. Keepit was a no-brainer in terms of simplicity and having a single 360 dashboard.
We have saved a ton of time not calculating metrics by hand.
We no longer spend time writing out cards during planning, it goes straight to the board.
We no longer track separate documents to track overall department goals. We were able to create customized icons at the department level that lets us track each team's progress against our dept goals.
