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To address its SharePoint Online management and data
protection needs, Oasis Community Learning uses AvePoint Online Services
(AOS), a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform hosted on Microsoft
Azure. Because backup is a high priority for IT, administrators were
drawn to the extent to which AOS is able to backup and restore
SharePoint Online content beyond the platform’s native capabilities.
While looking at different backup options, one possible solution
involved using backup hardware such as tapes and shell scripts. With the
variety of cloud-based backup destinations available through AOS, IT
was able to eliminate the need for this hardware – a savings of £40,000.
In addition to cost savings, Oasis Community
Learning also spent less time running backup jobs and restoring data.
With AOS, Bullimore has the ability to schedule automatic backups and
receive notifications when they are complete. AOS enables IT to capture
full-fidelity backups of its SharePoint Online content. This, along with
the ability to restore at the item level, results in a faster recovery
time objective. “If content gets deleted, we can restore items to the
same location and retain all properties,” Bullimore said. “We looked at
several different tools in the market, and AvePoint Online Services is
the only one that allowed us to retain all metadata. Having the
structures and permissions intact when restoring items is a real time
saver.”
This also reduced issues on the development side.
“With out-of-the-box capabilities, it was very difficult to document
exactly what and where content was deleted,” Russell said. “Without that
information, it would take us about a week to rebuild a site from
scratch since we couldn’t replace it exactly as it was. Now, we can
easily access our backups and restore items with all metadata retained.”
While the organisation’s administrators’ initial
intention was to find a SharePoint Online backup solution, they also
take advantage of AOS' other capabilities. “Once we’d chosen AvePoint
Online Services as being the best in backup, we explored some of the
platform’s other tools to manage and deploy sites across our SharePoint
Online environment,” Russell said.
One important component of developing the
organisation’s environment was building 47 site collections, one for
each of its academies in the UK. Although IT had devised its optimal
site collection templates, copying the templates was still too
time-consuming. “It previously took four days for our team of three to
develop a new site collection using native capabilities,” Russell said.
“With AOS, it took about five hours per site collection.”
Having reduced the time needed to provision these
site collections from nine months to just two, Oasis Community Learning
now has more time available to use AvePoint Online Services' other
functionalities. Specifically, Oasis Community Learning uses the
platform’s policy enforcement capabilities to ensure governance and
automate control over permissions, configurations, and security
settings. “The central administration portal in AOS is very useful,”
Russell said. “Because we’re delegating control of some site
collections, they won’t be tempted to change configurations. AOS allows
us to enforce policies that protect the integrity of site collections
once we give control to other teams.”