Kearney Optimizes Microsoft 365 Environment with AvePoint
Success Highlights
Saved up to $300,000 per year with AvePoint Opus
Completed four migrations for company acquisitions, with plans for more
Reduced vendor costs using the AvePoint Confidence Platform, which provides solutions for a variety of challenges
Location Chicago, Illinois
Industry Consulting
Platform Microsoft 365
Since 1926, Kearney has been a leading management consulting firm and trusted partner to three-quarters of the Fortune Global 500 and governments around the world. With a presence across more than 40 countries, our people make us who we are. We work impact first, tackling your toughest challenges with original thinking and a commitment to making change happen together. By your side, we deliver — value, results, impact.
Kearney provides high-level strategy advice to companies in the financial services, manufacturing, consumer retail, and high-tech sectors.The firm is an integral part of its clients’ decision-making processes, offering services as a trustworthy partner.
Critical Needs
- Control rapidly growing storage costs
- Efficiently migrate data during company acquisitions
- Protect sensitive, long-term data for specific departments like finance and HR
- Gain insights into intranet usage and user engagement
The Challenge
Kearney uses Microsoft 365 as its primary digital collaboration system and had experienced several challenges that native Microsoft solutions could not solve.
First, the firm has more than 7,000 Microsoft 365 users and counting, which led to unprecedented data surges and rapidly rising storage costs. Through its Microsoft Teams and SharePoint sites, Kearney was adding up to 10 terabytes of storage per month, resulting in substantial and unsustainable costs.
Second, the firm needed an efficient solution for migrating data during company acquisitions, especially from Google and Box to Microsoft. Similarly, Kearney needed to migrate information from various teams and tenants within the organization. Having one solution to help with both use cases was essential.
Third, Kearney wanted to gain better insights into its intranet usage. Knowledge managers needed a way to understand how different levels of consultants were interacting with their sites, what information was being accessed, and where users were coming from. The built-in SharePoint reporting tools were insufficient for these needs.
Finally, Kearney needed to protect sensitive, long-term data for specific departments, including finance and HR. Ideally, the firm wanted to work with one well-established vendor that could solve all these challenges.
Over the first year, we realized savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars in cost avoidance for purchasing storage for our project teams. AvePoint Opus definitely pays for itself. Any company with large volumes of data with uncontrolled growth would benefit from it.
Director of KnowledgeNet Systems and Infrastructure, Kearney
The AvePoint Solution
Kearney has been working with AvePoint for years, dating back to its on-premises SharePoint backup solution. AvePoint was a natural choice, as new challenges such as rising storage costs occurred.
When Kearney implemented AvePoint Opus to control version history and archive older documents, storage costs immediately dropped, saving the firm upward of $300,000 a year. This allowed Kearney to stop purchasing additional storage every month and reduce its storage renewal with Microsoft at the end of the year. According to David Ritchie, Kearney’s director of KnowledgeNet Systems and Infrastructure, “AvePoint’s self-service restore has also been extremely popular among our consultants, helping them recover archived documents and reducing the burden on our IT teams.”
As Kearney has grown, AvePoint Fly has been crucial for the firm’s acquisition strategy and was used for multiple company migrations, including moving a Google-based acquisition and a Box-based acquisition into the Office 365 environment. Fly’s ability to preserve permissions and simplify the migration process has made user transitions much smoother. Internally, Fly is used regularly to move data between OneDrive and Teams, saving time for consultants and reducing the burden on IT staff.
Company growth also required more investments into internal communications and culture. That’s where AvePoint tyGraph came into play, providing detailed insights into intranet usage beyond what Microsoft offers natively. The site owners report feature has been particularly valuable, allowing knowledge managers to access self-service reporting on their sites’ use to help them understand what information is resonating with colleagues.
Lastly, AvePoint Cloud Backup was implemented to protect six terabytes of sensitive data for finance and HR departments, giving Kearney confidence that the firm’s information was safe from both external and internal threats.
Kearney appreciated the integration between AvePoint products and the ease of management through one platform: the AvePoint Confidence Platform. The firm also noted that, once set up, many of the solutions require minimal effort to keep running, reducing the need for dedicated support teams.
The Road Ahead
Kearney sees AvePoint as a valuable long-term partner, especially as the firm’s digital transformation needs evolve. David emphasized the importance of AvePoint staying ahead of the curve. “The engineering and product teams at AvePoint have always provided that kind of directional innovation that we’ve been looking for as far as new features and where the products are going,” he said.
As Kearney grows and adapts to changing work environments, the firm anticipates more aggressive archiving solutions to reach a steady state where processes become even more automated and time-based. AvePoint’s seamless integration with the Microsoft 365 ecosystem and ease of management through a single platform position it as a strategic partner for Kearney’s future IT initiatives.
AvePoint Products
AvePoint Opus
Manage Microsoft 365 content and physical records together. Create and oversee classification policies, and implement flexible retention and disposal rules.
Fly SaaS
Transform and modernize your data with our Azure-hosted SaaS solution for Microsoft 365 workload migration or tenant restructuring.
Multi-SaaS Cloud Backup
Secure, automated backup and flexible restore for your critical Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, and AWS environments.
Microsoft 365 Backup
Automatic SaaS backup solution with flexible, on-demand restore for Microsoft 365 data and services.
AvePoint tyGraph
Turn insights into impact, empowering leaders to make data-driven decisions.