The Challenge

Its namesake is a symbol of strength, so it’s no surprise that Anvil Solutions recommends backup capabilities so customers can be resilient if the unexpected occurs.

Until recently, though, the New Zealand managed service provider found many businesses that had moved to the cloud were unaware about the need for data protection beyond what a SaaS platform such as Microsoft 365 can offer.

“These cloud companies have done a very good job of making everyone think the cloud is this magical place where you dump all your stuff and everything’s fine,” said Ashley Kirk, founder of Anvil. “But we’ve had a couple of clients who had accidental deletions or lost something in their mailbox, and they realized: ‘Oh, this is actually a major problem.’”

Microsoft 365 retains documents deleted from the SharePoint recycle bin for 93 days. Deleted emails can only be recovered up to 14 days.

Anvil has offered backup solutions to customers for years, but the MSP determined that its providers weren’t best suited to the critical task due to poor user experience and limited capabilities.

The biggest concern? “A lot of other backup services don’t back up in-place archives,” said Kirk, referencing the additional mailbox space available beyond a standard Microsoft Outlook account (which can’t exceed 100 GB).

“People’s mailboxes have grown and grown,” Kirk said. “What’s the point of having a backup product that doesn’t back up one of your mailboxes?”

Other third-party solutions also couldn’t easily deliver a Personal Storage Table (.pst) file used to store copies of messages, calendar events, and other items within Microsoft software such as Outlook. As a result, “You couldn’t just ‘turn it on’ again” after a restore, Kirk said. “Things weren’t how you thought they were going to be, or you had to do some other thing too.”

As soon as Kirk discovered AvePoint Cloud Backup could do the job, “it was just perfect timing.” The ability to restore granular data such as Teams chats and Microsoft Planner was also a key capacity Anvil wanted to offer.