The AvePoint Solution
Hero considered a few other options on the market but found they were “one trick ponies,” according to Bas, only doing part of what they needed. “We needed a partner who could help us implement the tool, had a good relationship with Microsoft, and a reputation for being reliable and quality.”
AvePoint Cloud Archiving was the only solution that met their requirements. Cloud Archiving helps organizations take full control of their data storage by identifying unused or inactive content and moving it to lower-cost storage tiers or archiving it and keeping it in place. Should an end-user need to access an archived item, they can request a restore via the access link.
The self-service restores via ReCenter were key for Hero. “For archiving to work, it’s important that people can always get their files back. With Cloud Archiving, users can see that their file was archived, where it was originally located, and restore files themselves, allowing us to be more aggressive with our archiving.”
Hero has relied on AvePoint to help build its archiving strategy. The AvePoint team has offered suggestions, like moving older document versions into archiving rather than simply removing them, that have helped save time and resources while implementing Hero’s strategy. “A cool tool won’t be useful if you don’t have people that can support you. AvePoint tailored advice to our specific situation, enabling us to leverage the tool better, and it’s really helping.”
Their end users have not felt the impact of this archiving, which Bas says is the ideal situation. “You know you are archiving correctly when users don’t notice anything. It means you are archiving things people aren’t using anymore.”
Hero has also partnered with AvePoint for its Microsoft 365 backup needs. They knew they needed a backup solution for business continuity, but the solution that was preferred based on current implementations for server backups, wasn’t user-friendly and required the infrastructure team to intervene to recover backups.
Because they were happy with the transparency and expertise offered during the archiving procurement, Hero decided to try AvePoint’s backup and recovery solution. Cloud Backup provided a more comprehensive backup and integrated better with Microsoft 365, which allowed for faster restores – without the assistance of additional teams.
Overall, Hero’s archiving strategy has vastly improved since the implementation of the AvePoint solutions. Bas says, “The big advantage of using two solutions from the same organization – Cloud Backup and Cloud Archiving – is that you can define archiving strategy in line with a backup strategy. It allows us to be more aggressive with our archiving settings because we know a backup is always available.”