Cloud Backup has helped us mitigate and reduce our risk. The biggest benefit of the solution has been a nice night of sleep. I finally know that if disaster strikes, we will not lose our Microsoft 365 data.
The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is a regional development bank committed to achieving a prosperous, inclusive, resilient, and sustainable Asia and the Pacific, while sustaining its efforts to eradicate extreme poverty. It assists its members and partners by providing loans, technical assistance, grants, and equity investments to promote social and economic development.
From 31 members at its establishment in 1966, ADB has grown to encompass 68 members—of which 49 are from within Asia and the Pacific and 19 outside.
When Asian Development Bank (ADB) initially onboarded M365, they started looking at backup and restore solutions immediately. They knew high adoption of the platform would lead to a huge amount of digital data, including business-critical and sensitive client information, that needed to be protected.
Like any financial institution, ADB is dutybound to protect their customers’ personal information. “If an end user accidentally deleted certain files or if they encountered a ransomware attack, we cannot bear the risk of losing this valuable data,” explains ADB’s Deputy Director General, Pierre Passin.
Beyond these liabilities, ADB needed a solution that would ensure operationality agility. If an outage or data breach did occur and important information was deleted or lost, ADB needed an efficient and simple recovery method that would get them back up to speed quickly.
Unfortunately, due to architecture and internal resourcing, in-house backup options were out of the question. ADB also could not depend on out-the-box protection; M365 only retains documents deleted from the SharePoint recycle bin for 93 days. Like others in the financial industry, ADB’s record lifecycle was also more complex than what could natively be supported.
“Our biggest fear was a cybercrime scenario, particularly as ransomware is becoming more common. We needed to protect ourselves from situations we couldn’t control.”
ADB did not want an incident to occur before establishing their data protection plan. They needed to find a reliable and automated backup with granular retention and deletion settings that could protect both their legacy data and rapidly growing new data.
ADB found their solution in AvePoint’s Cloud Backup. The solution protected their data with quick recoveries in the event of a data loss incident. Whether user error, outage, or – their worst fear, ransomware – they were covered.
“Back then, the market was very immature,” explained Pierre. “Alternative solutions did not meet all our needs. Cloud Backup was the only solution that covered the full gamut of M365 and had a bring-your-own storage option.”
AvePoint also helped improve the bank’s cost of storage ownership. ADB’s Azure BLOB Storage was functional, but expensive. As more of their team adopted digital solutions, their storage had grown tenfold. AvePoint worked with ADB to ease the storage cost by converting them to the latest Cloud Backup, allowing the bank to back up as much as they needed while AvePoint took care of the storage and retention of their legacy data.
Today, ADB has around 6,400 users employing M365 to its full extent. As predicted, ADB’s data has continued to grow. “We have a trove of valuable data residing in both SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams,” says Pierre. “Cloud Backup currently protects 15 TB of our data, and since the solution is based on time retention, we know our data will be protected as we continue to produce more.”
“Acquiring Cloud Backup was a risk reduction exercise,” says Pierre. While their supra-national nature means they are not regulated by standard government mandates, the bank does apply risk management techniques, which flagged potential loss as a huge risk. “Cloud Backup is part of our broader data protection strategy that helps mitigate our risk, ensuring business continuity, maintaining public trust, and protecting our reputation.”
The successful deployment of Cloud Backup has given ADB peace of mind. “The biggest benefit of the solution has been a nice night of sleep,” Pierre says. “I finally know that if disaster strikes, we will not lose our M365 data.”
With Cloud Backup in place, ADB does not need to worry about data loss; they know their data is protected and easily retrievable. Their IT team can be freed from repetitive tasks and focus on other priorities, thanks to delegated restores. Moreover, their savings on storage costs can go towards more worthy pursuits, like their mission to eradicate extreme poverty.
Pierre’s last piece of advice for others: “Don’t assume that because it is the cloud, your backup and restore needs are covered.” He encourages others to understand their needs before deciding if out-the-box solutions are enough.
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