Purdue Pharma Improves IT Efficiency and Supports Microsoft Office 365 Users with AvePoint Online Services
Success Highlights
Customer Location Stamford, CT
Industry Pharmaceuticals
Platform Microsoft 365, SharePoint Online
Critical Needs
- The ability to quickly restore SharePoint Online content for end users
- Simplified movement of content within SharePoint Online environment
- Automatically enforce site policies and archive content
The Challenge
Known for its research and solutions for pain and opioids with abuse deterrent properties, Purdue Pharma has long supported collaboration among its workforce with Microsoft productivity platforms. Recently, the company made the decision to move to the Microsoft Cloud – and Office 365 in particular – to benefit its business users. “In addition to being a major cost-saving initiative, moving to the cloud would allow us to respond to needs in a more agile way,” said Stephen Choolfaian, Senior IT Lead at Purdue Pharma. “Office 365 made it easier for us to scale and make content available to our users on their mobile devices.”
On Office 365, SharePoint Online is a critical system for the organization for document storage, collaborative team sites, and business user applications. The system also acts as a full-fledged workflow application, making it easier to automate processes around initiatives like the company’s Law Enforcement Education program, which tracks the company’s efforts to help against drug diversion. Purdue Pharma is currently supporting more than 1,500 users and storing one terabyte of content on SharePoint Online.
In the process of planning its move to Office 365, Purdue Pharma administrators determined that Office 365’s native ability to recover files was not sufficient for its needs. If a user was to delete a document library, the only way to get it back would be to override the entire site collection with a backup, losing any changes that were made after the deletion occurred. “The Office 365 data recovery capabilities are set up for either complete disasters or small problems, but we needed a system that could provide data security at any level,” Choolfaian said.
The company’s administrators began a search for the right solution.
Senior IT Lead, Purdue Pharma
The AvePoint Solution
Purdue Pharma chose to implement AvePoint Online Services (AOS) – a 100 percent Microsoft Azure-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform for Office 365. “AvePoint Online Services was our solution of choice because it met all of our Office 365 management needs and is entirely cloud based – which no one else offers,” Choolfaian said. “We were able to get the tool up and running in one morning, and absolutely no maintenance is required to keep it up to date.”
With AOS, Purdue Pharma was able to solve its immediate needs around Office 365 backup and recovery. In addition to simplifying management of Office 365, AvePoint Online Services provides fast, full-fidelity backup and restore capabilities. “AOS lets us easily carry out point-in-time backups and granular recovery, giving us a level of security that SharePoint Online alone doesn’t offer,” said Choolfaian.
This improved ability to restore content provided major benefits to users and business productivity in general. “Our ability to recover content for users improved from a three-day window to a one-day window with AOS,” Choolfaian said.
AvePoint Online Services also enables the company to easily move content within SharePoint Online for users. Purdue Pharma can easily respond to evolving architecture needs by moving content in bulk across Office 365 – eliminating the need to carry out a time-consuming export and import process as the platform’s native abilities require. “As you’re governing a system, you’re continually reorganizing it,” Choolfaian said. “With AOS, I can simply point to content and move it where I need, with batch jobs running at a fast rate on the Azure cloud – ultimately saving time and making my job easier.”
Working in a highly regulated industry, ensuring compliance with internal and external governance policies is a top concern for Purdue Pharma’s IT team. Specifically, internal policy dictates that certain SharePoint sites must have document versioning turned on in order to retain a history of the content. With AvePoint Online Services, Purdue can monitor its sites around the clock and automatically adjust unauthorized changes in settings, security, and configurations. “AOS allows us to automatically enforce versioning on sites where it is required so that Office 365 stays consistent with our company policies around content management and storage.”
In the future, Purdue Pharma will rely on AvePoint Online Services as a key component of its content archiving process. Using Nintex Workflow software, administrators will identify sites that are no longer used, and AOS will then automatically archive those sites to Azure storage. “We have to be careful about what we delete from our environment, so we need to archive specific content that has not been used for extended periods of time to de-clutter our system,” Choolfaian said. “AvePoint Online Services will be an important part of this process.”
The Road Ahead
With AvePoint Online Services, Purdue Pharma was able to meet all of its Office 365 management needs – including data protection, content migration, policy enforcement, and archiving – with one SaaS solution. In addition to improving efficiency and saving time, the organization’s IT team was also able to fulfill its mission to be more agile and responsive to business user requests by leveraging the cloud. “Office 365 has gaps in its functionality, and we’re now able to address them with AvePoint,” Choolfaian said. “Having a tool like AvePoint Online Services is like a fire extinguisher – when you need it most, it’s the happiest thing you’ll ever see.”