GrowthPoint Chooses Cloud Backup Over Mimecast For Simplicity & Granularity
Success Highlights
Customer Location Sandton, South Africa
Industry Real Estate
Platform Microsoft 365
Growthpoint Properties Limited is the largest property investment holding company listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, with a portfolio of approximately 450 directly owned properties in South Africa valued at almost R80 billion (about $4.7 billion US).
Critical Needs
- Item-level backup and restore including calendar, contacts and files.
- Effective tool requiring minimal attention
The Challenge
As GrowthPoint progressed on their Office 365 journey, Alec Davis, the CIO at GrowthPoint, knew the real estate investment holding company would need a third-party backup solution to protect their data in Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online.
“When push comes to shove, if you don’t activate a feature like the litigation hold [in Office 365] up front, then you don’t have [your data] and then its too late to find out after the fact you should have activated a button up front,” said Davis.
GrowthPoint, like most companies, had gone through painful data loss experiences.
“We’ve had people lose content or deliberately delete content, either maliciously or by [accident],” said Davis. “When those incidents occurred it became really obvious that we needed some additional product.”
The company found the original third-party solution they chose for Office 365 backup did not meet their requirements
“We had a solution in place with the likes of Mimecast that initially was purely around the archiving of email. Nothing around calendaring or contacts,” said Davis.
GrowthPoint also wanted enhanced granular restore capability.
“Now all of this strictly email content is archived, but it is not so easy to go in and restore,” said Davis. “You can find it again, but to bring it back into the same structure as people had it before is quite tricky.”
With these requirements in mind, they eventually settled on AvePoint Cloud Backup
CIO, GrowthPoint
The AvePoint Solution
Everything, from the acquisition to installation process, for AvePoint Cloud Backup was simple.
“This was our first procurement from AvePoint and it was a very simple process. Of all the solutions we had in place, it was by far the cleanest to deploy, least touch point on our environment,” said Davis. “The installation has been absolutely hassle-free. There’s been no disruption into the environment.”
GrowthPoint is using Cloud Backup to automatically run up to 4 backups a day of their Office 365 environment seamless, without any impact on their users.
“The API logs into the Office 365 environment and literally you select what you want from OneDrive, Teams, SharePoint, down to a contact or an email,” said Davis. “It was easily activated across our entire userbase.”
GrowthPoint has been particularly impressed with the restores they have executed thus far.
“That’s the key I think with this kind of software for us—that is as good and quick to deploy as it is to do the restore,” said Davis. “With the restore it’s the proof is in the pudding.”
Growth Point is also taking advantage of Cloud Backup’s reporting features which allow them to view details of their four most recent backups via an easy-to-read report dashboard including job status, time finished, total number of successful/ failed/slipped items, and suggestions for how to remediate issues.
They can also track and manage all of their backup and restore processes through a central management console in addition to gaining full visibility into how the service is being access by their users.
“The APIs are slick and the dashboards are easy to understand,” said Davis
The Road Ahead
The bottom line for GrowthPoint is they got exactly the backup and data protection they sought for their Office 365 environment.
“What we get out of the product is what we paid for, what we wanted, what we got,” said Davis.
When GrowthPoint needs that essentially piece of data or file, Davis knows he will have it. He also appreciates the automation a SaaS solution brings compared to on-premises offerings.
“As a result, this gives me a peace of mind, lets me sleep at night, knowing these backups are happening seamlessly in the background with no user intervention, which is a great feature compared to the types of backups we used to run on-premise,” said Davis.
