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Infrastructure Management Solutions

Infrastructure Management Solutions

SharePoint Infrastructure Management

Challenges of SharePoint Infrastructure Management

According to a recent study1 , having a common framework for collaboration in the enterprise increased productivity by 20 to 25 percent. Collaboration can not only improve efficiency of digital asset management, but promote knowledge sharing to help maximize information value. In order to enable true collaboration, users must be able to have confidence in the platform being used.

While Microsoft® SharePoint® is undoubtedly an invaluable collaboration platform, managing the underlying infrastructure is challenging as there are many components to consider.

For an infrastructure management solution to be effective, it must address the challenges faced by those managing the underlying infrastructure:

  • Minimizing
    TCO
  • Optimizing
    SLAs
  • Ensuring
    Compliance

Minimizing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Modern collaboration services require organizations to rethink how to meet the increasing cost of continuous data growth. They must adjust to effectively manage their infrastructure across data centers, hybrid deployments, and cloud-based content. IT administrators now face the challenge of minimizing the exponential growth of costs associated with storing and maintaining data such as:

  • Meeting content lifecycle management needs of users and policies without incurring unnecessary storage cost of expired content
  • Accommodating growing storage needs while economically retaining inactive content
  • Protecting content as the amount of data increases, without negatively impacting productivity
  • Consolidating content into a single collaboration platform without loss of metadata
  • Guaranteeing data integrity and security while deploying hybrid cloud environments
  • Ensuring appropriate content access while promoting user-driven collaboration
  • Integrating social collaboration while maintaining appropriateness and accurate records
  • Scaling maintenance strategy to meet growing business needs without straining IT staff resources.
  • Expanding the services offered for collaboration without requiring custom development

Optimizing Service Level Agreements (SLA)

As organizations expand globally, the need for a stable collaboration platform puts stringent demands on the IT administrators who maintain the underlying infrastructure.

To meet increasing business and user requirements for constant collaboration and communication, organizations face SLA challenges in terms of reliability, availability, and serviceability.

Reliability

  • Content downtime is a cost to the business, both on the user scale and the platform level
  • Adhering to Microsoft’s best practice standards allow for optimal performance and a better user experience for users, but may cause sluggish performance

Availability

  • Maintaining a failover environment can be extremely time-consuming since new content is constantly generated
  • Loss of customizations, configurations, and metadata from disasters (such as a flood or hardware failure) result in delays in full system restoration, inhibiting productivity

Serviceability

  • As environments grow, organizations face structure loss that can make content difficult to find while reorganizing architecture with built-in features quickly becomes time and resource intensive
  • IT must have the ability and resources to identify and locate issues quickly

Ensuring Compliance

Successful infrastructure management creates increasing compliance pressures for enterprise organizations in 2013. Organizations face the question of how to adopt a flexible, collaborative platform and social initiatives while simultaneously ensuring compliance with a growing set of regulations and mandates. Common compliance challenges in infrastructure management include the need to:

  • Automate access and permissions control
  • Swiftly identify non-compliant events
  • Guarantee protection of intellectual property and sensitive customer data
  • Provide an accessible, unified platform for sharing information
  • Reduce manual reporting to ensure accuracy and the growing needs of auditors
  • Mitigate the risk of accessibility, operational security, privacy, and site quality violations

At the end of the day, organizations need the peace of mind to ensure content is available and accessible to the people who should have access and protected from the people who should not.

1 http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Capturing_business_value_with_social_technologies_3029

AvePoint Infrastructure Management Solution for Microsoft SharePoint

A unified management platform that can facilitate lifecycle management of content coming from multiple sources, permissions control to ensure the right users have the right access, management of on-premise infrastructure, and embrace changing technologies such as cloud initiatives can help IT operate at optimal efficiency while supporting the complex business needs of today’s global organizations.

  • Lowered
    TCO
  • Improved
    SLAs
  • Trusted
    Compliance

Lowered Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

A centralized platform for managing on-premise and remote infrastructure helps IT administrators plan for a structured and organized infrastructure, which not only improves efficiency for system management but provides a more consistent end-user experience.

To minimize TCO, organizations can:

  • Connect to existing file share drives to avoid time- and resource-intensive migration
  • Reduce cost by moving storage heavy unstructured data (BLOBs) from expensive SQL Server content databases to lower tier storage
  • Archive dated and inactive content to cheaper storage
  • Automate backup, storage optimization, and reporting jobs as well as adopt user-driven site creation and lifecycle management technologies
  • Anticipate costs and create charge back models with comprehensive reporting that helps predict storage growth, user activity, and appropriate level of service
  • Move to cloud-based infrastructure with built-in global redundancy

Offering a repeatable, predictable, and governable center of information collaboration allows organizations to drastically minimize their total cost of ownership.

Improved Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

Consistently meeting stringent demands of a global organization requires planning and intelligent technology. In order to maintain high system uptime, content relevancy, stable system performance, and be able to quickly react and counteract disasters, the technology you adopt needs to not only enable you to offer a superior SLA, but also allow you to maintain it efficiently:

Reliability

  • Automate full and incremental backups to run on a schedule with point of time recovery capabilities
  • Manage change throughout the content, application, and software development and publication lifecycles to minimize risks of human error while increasing reliability of the platform

Availability

  • Provide reliable SharePoint access and collaboration for geographically dispersed users
  • Ensure full-fidelity platform recovery, including farm components, customizations, configurations metadata and externalized content

Serviceability

  • Automate change management with user-driven services that adhere to corporately defined policies
  • Monitor performance to ensure compliance with Microsoft best practices

Trusted Compliance

Developing a strong risk management plan ensures that organizations maintain a compliant, accessible, and manageable environment that mitigates the risk of accessibility, operational security, privacy, and site quality policy violations.

  • Automate access and controls across the enterprise to mitigate the risk of incidents
  • Detect, track, respond, and resolve to content breaches
  • Implement stronger security controls to mitigate the risk of future violations
  • Protect content sensitivity, security, and records management with a scalable framework that supports all regional and/or industry compliance regulations and standards
  • Report on overall compliance health of your environment through a risk assessment framework and end-user friendly reporting platform that identifies single points of failure, potential “bottlenecks”, security risks, and risk related to capacity

Learn more about AvePoint’s Compliance Solutions.

AvePoint’s Products for SharePoint Infrastructure Management

By consolidating management of content, users, access controls, and actual storage and communication infrastructure, AvePoint aims to simplify the implementation of enterprise-wide policies for governance, security, and compliance – regardless of how stakeholders choose to collaborate anywhere, anytime.

AvePoint stitches together your infrastructure seamlessly, allowing you to move and replicate content across environments as well as apply governance policies to your online and on-premise infrastructure.

AvePoint Product Features
DocAve Platform Backup and Restore Ensure fast, full-fidelity recovery of any lost or corrupted documents, objects, sites, and site collections directly to the production environment or to any other SharePoint location with no need for staging.
DocAve Connector Present and manage file share documents and media content directly in Microsoft SharePoint 2013 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010 without migration, and configure SharePoint to handle digital asset management.
DocAve Archiver Expire content, set a lease on content, and predict costs.
DocAve Granular Backup and Restore Achieve self-service with single item restoration.
DocAve Storage Manager Mitigate the negative consequences of exponential data growth by combining multiple real-time and scheduled business rules to externalize content based on file size, type, or other document properties.
AvePoint Compliance Guardian Proactively protect your environment from harmful information leaks, contamination, or misuse while simultaneously ensuring that all activities and content residing in the environment are compliant, accessible, and manageable.
DocAve Governance Automation Automate the way users provision, manage, and modify sites and permissions. Ensure all requests are fulfilled within established governance policies by providing a fully auditable business approval process.
DocAve Replicator Scale globally while managing content locally. Replicate content, configurations, and security settings between a single site, across multiple sites, or across geo-distributed SharePoint environments.
DocAve Administrator Centralize access controls to reduce cost of maintenance across the entire SharePoint deployment.
DocAve Migrator Improve user productivity by extending their reach. Consolidate storage and reduce cost of ownership by reducing maintenance costs on multiple systems.
DocAve Content Manager Utilize SharePoint’s site-based architecture to design an ECM system aligned with organizational structure – both today and tomorrow as enterprises continue to evolve their business and technical initiatives.
DocAve Report Center Monitor SharePoint system performance and activity from a single dashboard to predict costs, prevent performance bottlenecks and non-compliance events, and assist in future scaling planning.

Next Steps

  1. Check out AvePoint’s Collaboration with Confidence webinar series.
  2. Speak to a Representative. Contact us to find out how to schedule a product demonstration.
  3. Read our Case Studies to see how other customers have optimized their infrastructure with AvePoint.
AvePoint Governance Solutions