Because we leverage two solutions from AvePoint, the County gets a single pane of glass for management, making it easier for our cloud team to configure and manage the backup and governance solutions. This has not only saved us time and resources but has also simplified training as our team doesn’t have to learn a bunch of different products.
Located in Southern California, Orange County is home to over 3 million residents and is known for its mild climate, beautiful beaches, and thriving business economy. As a regional service provider and planning agency, the County of Orange provides public safety, public health, environmental protection, regional planning, public assistance, social services, and aviation services to its residents.
The County of Orange faced significant challenges with its previous data protection strategy, which was decentralized and outdated. Each agency within the organization had its own on-premises backup solution, which was slow and cumbersome. After rolling out Microsoft Teams, they realized that workspace sprawl was also consuming valuable space in their backup storage, leaving them concerned about reaching capacity.
To overcome these challenges, the County of Orange needed a more efficient and streamlined solution to ensure that their data is protected, secure, and accessible, while also controlling the creation and retention of workplaces.
Orange County centralized its backup in AvePoint Cloud Backup, which allowed them to back up all their cloud services, including SharePoint Online, OneDrive, and Exchange Online, using a single product.
According to the County of Orange’s Information Systems Engineer, "Cloud Backup streamlined our backup process. Using a SaaS backup solution is a lot more efficient, and we can backup a lot of data quicker." The County currently backs up more than 60 TB of data.
Since implementing Cloud Backup, the County has successfully used it to recover data from OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams. The County found the single item restores particularly useful, as it allowed them to drill down and search for a single item in OneDrive or Teams and restore it quickly.
In most cases, though, the County has had to restore mailboxes in Exchange Online. Restoring mailboxes manually requires intricate knowledge of both Exchange and PowerShell scripts, but using Cloud Backup takes only a few hours and restores the mailbox in its entirety, including folder structure, which is not possible natively. This capability is essential to their recovery operations, as the Information Systems Engineer explains: “Staff want the hierarchy and folder structure how it was so they don’t have to recreate work.”
To control the growth of Teams site creation, the County leveraged AvePoint Cloud Governance, which automates and controls the management of content ownership, policies, and lifecycle according to evolving business needs.
As part of this solution, the County stopped allowing staff to create sites manually and instead provided a framework for creating sites through Cloud Governance, reducing the burden on the SharePoint team to spin up sites. The framework included conditions for workspace creation, like naming conventions, allowing the County to accurately report on costs by agency, which was difficult to discern previously.
The County also used Cloud Governance to implement an inactivity threshold to archive and eventually delete unused sites, reducing the risk of sprawl and freeing up valuable space in their storage. During the first inactivity review period, Cloud Governance identified many "test" sites created by staff when adopting Teams. These sites had been taking up valuable backup storage space, but after reaching the inactivity threshold, they were deleted, clearing up space for the County.
“Because we leverage two solutions from AvePoint, the County gets a single pane of glass for management, making it easier for our cloud team to configure and manage the backup and governance solutions,” says the Information Systems Engineer. “This has not only saved us time and resources but has also simplified training as our team doesn’t have to learn a bunch of different products.”
By consolidating their backup process with Cloud Backup and implementing Cloud Governance for workspace creation and retention, the County has improved efficiency, reduced sprawl and storage costs, and enhanced data protection, security, and accessibility. The integration of Cloud Backup and Cloud Governance has created a more effective solution for the County that optimizes their cloud environment and streamlines management.
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