“Ease of use really stands out for this product…it frees up the team to do what they want to be do, or the projects we should be working on.... everybody wins!”
daa is a global airports and travel retail group with businesses in 13 countries. The organisation is owned by the Irish State and headquartered at Dublin Airport.
The organisation manages Dublin and Cork airports and have overseas airport operations and investments in Cyprus, Germany, and Saudi Arabia.
Their travel retail subsidiary ARI also has outlets in Europe, North America, the Middle East, India and Asia-Pacific. daa also provides international aviation advisory services.
daa has about 4,000 users of which about 60 percent are knowledge workers with the remaining 40 percent consisting of kiosk/firstline workers who work in roles such as maintenance.
Given that daa is a regulated organisation, they have taken a more conservative and careful approach to Office 365 driven in large part by their partners who help deliver their mission critical systems.
The organisation realised they need a third-party backup solution as the standard Microsoft 90-day retention period for deleted content was not sufficient to meet their internal retention policies.
Following advice from external analysts like Gartner, daa also decided to create an exit strategy from Office 365 in the highly unlikely event that they decide to move away from the platform.
“To support this strategy, we needed an independent location for our data,” stated Kevin Ryan, IT operations team lead at daa.
After conducting extensive market research, AvePoint Cloud Backup was the only product which met all their operational and IT security requirements.
Their security requirements included encryption of data, multi-factor authentication, ISO 27001:2013 compliance, and data deletion via GDPR Article 17.
“The only way to have full protection from ransomware is to invest in a 3rd party backup solution like AvePoint Cloud Backup,” said Ryan.
Operationally, they wanted a solution that could backup multiple Office 365 workloads at a granular (item/permissions) level while also protecting them against potential malicious insiders.
The onboarding and support experience exceeded their expectations. “One of the other impressive things about AvePoint, is their support. Having worked with multiple vendors and providers and various sizes and structures of support over the years, I would have to say that AvePoint support is up there with the best, in my experience.”
daa has been using AvePoint Cloud Backup for three years and has been very impressed with the usability of the SaaS product.
“Ease of use really stands out for this product – it just works. From an operational perspective, I am obsessed with minimising complexity,” stated Ryan. It frees up the team to do what they want to do so they stay interested and engaged. It keeps our stakeholders happy – everybody wins!” stated Ryan.
This is in stark contrast to their backup solution for their on-premises data that spans 20 servers, four separate SANS and requires a team to support.
Introducing four different restore points each day was also a major change for daa, but one that save their users and admins “quite some time.”
Overall, daa has had a very positive experience.
“AvePoint provides a modern service and is a company that seem to have really thought about how to make our lives easier, while ensure that our data is protected,” stated Ryan.
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“Ease of use really stands out for this product…it frees up the team to do what they want to be do, or the projects we should be working on.... everybody wins!”