Airways New Zealand: Office 365 Compliance Done Right
Critical Needs
- Compliant migration
- Records management
- Groups management
- Backup
- Customer Location Christchurch, Wellington, Auckland, New Zealand
- Industry Public Sector
- Platform Office 365
- AvePoint Solutions Archiver Cloud Backup Cloud Records Cloud Governance GroupHub Compliance Guardian
Success Highlights
- On track to execute a compliant migration with a thorough discovery process by 2019
- Restored important files stranded on an ex-employees OneDrive
- Leading the way in how to achieve PRA compliance in a cloud environment
- Increased Records Management efficiency and reporting
- Proactively governing the provisioning, lifecycle and expiration of more than 280 Office 365 Groups
We want other companies to refer to us as an example of compliance done right in New Zealand thanks to AvePoint products.
The Challenge
Airways New Zealand is an enterprise owned by the New Zealand government. They are subject to the government’s Public Records Act (PRA) as well as strict regulations across the civil aviation, health and safety industries.
Starting in 2015, the enterprise started its move from an aging on-premise infrastructure to the cloud while achieving compliance with strict civil aviation and government regulations such as the new Public Records Act of 2005 (PRA), as well as the Health and Safety Reform Bill of 2016.
The Office 365 environment provided Airways New Zealand with a challenge to ensure electronic records were compliant and meeting Archive New Zealand’s Mandatory Standards for Public Records. Protecting against the loss of records from unintentional user errors like accidental deletion, was also mission critical for the government entity.
Compliance wasn’t the sole ambition for the Airways New Zealand Digital Information team. They also needed to increase audit reporting efficiencies, end-user adoption and maintain an organized collaboration environment.
“Our role is helping people be proactive in Office 365,” said Jenny Ryan, a Digital Information Analyst with Airways New Zealand.
To do this, Airways New Zealand examined a variety of third-party solutions before ultimately turning to AvePoint.
The AvePoint Solution
Once in Office 365, Airways New Zealand knew they would need to supplement the native backup capabilities.
“The backup provided out-of-the-box might have been fine if we weren’t a government department, but we need to have the ability to restore item level email and OneDrive content, in addition to documents stored in SharePoint,” said Ryan.
This provided an immediate win when an employee left the company with critical information still living on their OneDrive. Thanks to the Digital Information Team’s vigilance, AvePoint Cloud Backup was able to recover important documents that otherwise would have been lost.
As a public-sector leader that undergoes frequent audits, Airways New Zealand wasn’t satisfied that Office 365’s native functionality could achieve the Public Records Act Mandatory Standards.
They closely examined the metadata required and determined that business activity, access, and record class data are required by the Archives NZ and made those default fields so that working with AvePoint’s Cloud Records rules they can apply archiving and disposal routines to move content in a very automated, efficient and disciplined process.
Additionally, Cloud Records has dramatically improved the appeal of their reporting compared to the native “spreadsheet dump” functionality.
The Digital Information Team discovered their users loved Office 365 Groups and had created more than 280. The team is in the process of implementing AvePoint’s Cloud Governance and GroupHub solutions to organize, delete, manage and clean up the Airways New Zealand Airways Groups environment, before using the Cloud Governance tool to allow users to create their own, PRA compliant Groups without needing to involve the Digital Workplace team.
“We want to make it easy to use a compliant environment,” said Ryan. “Our plan is that if someone wants a SharePoint site or Group, Cloud Governance can help them fill out a questionnaire to label everything for them and get approval, so they can self-serve to improve productivity.”
The Bottom Line
Airways New Zealand wanted an easy-to-use compliant environment. They are looking forward to saving time and the ability to do things they could not do before, with more reporting, capacity and flexibility. Airways New Zealand aims to be a prime example of compliance done right thanks to AvePoint solutions.
About Airways New Zealand
Airways is New Zealand’s air traffic control and navigation service provider and a state-owned enterprise. They deliver air navigation and air traffic management consultancy and training services throughout New Zealand and in over 65 countries.