AvePoint Online Services gives us assurance that if documents go missing or we run into problems within our Office 365 environment, we have a full backup available in the cloud along with granular content restoration abilities to minimise business disruption.
Originally an independent business unit within Spark Digital – the business and commercial arm of Spark New Zealand – Davanti became an independent organisation in 2013. At that time, Davanti also chose to move off of Telecom New Zealand’s technology stack in favour of cloud services. “We opted to move to the cloud to make information more accessible to our staff of 100 – many of whom work remotely from client sites,” said John Baddiley, Senior Business Manager at Davanti. “Additionally, the cloud would enable us to avoid requirements for on-premises hardware or dedicated support staff to run our systems.”
With employees needing to use a wide variety of devices to access information, Davanti narrowed its cloud services search down to Microsoft Office 365 and Google Docs. “We chose Office 365 due to both our users’ and clients’ familiarity with the Office applications, such as Word and PowerPoint, as well as the ability to access Exchange Online for email and SharePoint Online for document management,” Baddiley said. “We knew that using SharePoint Online would enable us to take advantage of document versioning, find information better with policies around properly storing documents with metadata, and allow multiple users to collaborate over the same files at once.”
With years of experience in banking IT and a focus on application security, Baddiley felt strongly that an extra backup solution would be necessary to protect Davanti’s business-critical content in Office 365. “From the outset, I knew that cloud services do not necessarily guarantee disaster recovery and business continuity,” Baddiley said. “While Microsoft does a fantastic job at making sure systems are up and available, if we lost content or if data was corrupted, it could be difficult to get it back through Microsoft’s service level agreements for data recovery.”
Baddiley found the solution that met Davanti’s needs in AvePoint Online Services (AOS). Built on Microsoft Azure, AOS is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that simplifies administration and management of Office 365, as well as provides item through platform level backup and restore capabilities for SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and OneDrive for Business. “AvePoint Online Services gives us assurance that if documents go missing or we run into problems within our Office 365 environment, we have a full backup available in the cloud along with granular content restoration abilities that will minimise business disruption,” Baddiley said. “It’s a nice insurance policy.”
Using AOS, Baddiley set up weekly incremental backups for SharePoint Online content as well as daily backups for Exchange Online shared mailboxes. Baddiley was able to get the automated backups set up and running within half an hour. The overall ease of use of AOS was critical for Baddiley in his role at Davanti. “Though I’m from a technical background, my chief responsibility is not maintaining technology for the company – it’s running the Cloud and Enterprise Architecture consulting practices for our business,” Baddiley said. “Without a dedicated technical support team at Davanti, we don’t have hours to spend configuring software. AvePoint Online Services' ability to help minimise the time we spend maintaining and protecting Office 365 is important.”
In order to quickly restore content within its Office 365 environment, Davanti was able to utilise AvePoint Online Services' granular content recovery capabilities without having to roll back the entire environment and interrupt business operations. Since key stakeholders at Davanti have delegated administrative rights throughout the environment, this was especially critical. “We had an instance where an office coordinator accidentally deleted an entire Exchange Online shared mailbox and we needed to restore it,” Baddiley said. “Thanks to AOS, we restored the mailbox in its entirety within half an hour. While having people from the business help manage or environment helps save time and resources, it is important to have the right tool in place in case mistakes do happen.”
Now that Davanti has sufficiently protected its Office 365 content and has been using the system for more than one year, the company seeks to continually optimise its SharePoint Online information architecture to help its users be even more productive on the platform. As the company plans out the next stage of its implementation, Baddiley will look to AvePoint Online Services to continually help manage and protect the environment – potentially taking advantage of additional features such as content management and replication. “Once we’ve defined what we want to do next with our SharePoint Online deployment, we will determine how AOS can help,” Baddiley said. “As we make future plans, it’s nice to know AOS is there to support us.”
Davanti Consulting is a business and technology consultancy with deep expertise in customer engagement, cloud architecture, salesforce.com, and mobility.
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AvePoint Online Services gives us assurance that if documents go missing or we run into problems within our Office 365 environment, we have a full backup available in the cloud along with granular content restoration abilities to minimise business disruption.