Railway Procurement Agency Restores Microsoft® SharePoint® Data in Seconds and Saves Two Hours per Week for Administrator with DocAve®
Success Highlights
Customer Location Dublin, Ireland
Industry Public Sector
Platform SharePoint 2010
Critical Needs
- Full system, granular, and incremental backups customized according to business need and run on a scheduled basis
- Swift restoration of lost or deleted content for end users
The Challenge
RPA utilises SharePoint 2010 as a source of communication both internally and externally. The organisation’s employees utilise the platform to access the company intranet, containing information and documentation relevant for internal use. The organisation also maintains an extranet on SharePoint, which contains information and documentation accessed by clients and contractors.
Between employees and external users, RPA has approximately 230 end users accessing a SharePoint environment that contains more than 300 gigabytes (GB) of data. The organisation’s deployment has grown steadily since it began using SharePoint 2003 and is expected to grow even more in the near future. “The amount of content in our SharePoint deployment will rise severely in the next few years as the platform is utilised to support upcoming projects,” said Paul Cuthbert, SharePoint Administrator at RPA. “I estimate it will increase by approximately 50% in that time.”
With the amount of business critical content in SharePoint increasing, it was important that RPA keep its data sufficiently protected. However, the organisation encountered issues with SharePoint’s native data protection abilities, especially when it came to backing up and restoring content granularly. “We had trouble backing up individual items with SharePoint’s backup abilities, and restoring a single item required us to restore an entire site,” Cuthbert said. “We needed a more reliable backup tool and less cumbersome way to restore individual items that were lost or deleted by end users.”
Cuthbert and his team began to investigate solutions.
SharePoint Administrator, Railway Procurement Agency
The AvePoint Solution
In light of a positive experience completing a SharePoint migration with DocAve Migrator in the past, RPA investigated and chose to implement DocAve Backup and Restore, part of AvePoint’s enterprise-class management platform for SharePoint governance – the DocAve Software Platform. DocAve Backup and Restore provides business-aware, comprehensive, SLA-driven protection of SharePoint environments, addressing the need for a fast, flexible, and intelligent backup solution.
With DocAve, RPA was able to schedule a backup plan that met its specific business needs, which included full system backups run over the weekend as well as granular and incremental backups run nightly in order to ensure the organisation’s most important data was protected. “DocAve’s reliability and scheduling function makes managing and administering our SharePoint backups easy,” Cuthbert said. “I save two hours of my time per week due to our use of DocAve, and that is important as I am the organisation’s only SharePoint administrator.”
RPA’s needs for granular data protection were also met, as DocAve provides full-fidelity backup and recovery, from an individual content item to an entire SharePoint environment and all of its farm-level components, maintaining all metadata, security settings, and version histories. All restores of missing or corrupted content can be processed in a live SharePoint environment during standard hours of operation without interrupting the flow of business. “When data is lost and needs to be restored, DocAve gets the job done quickly for us,” Cuthbert said. “By simply accessing DocAve’s interface, picking a date, and clicking a button, the content is instantly restored to its proper site collection. We can restore content within seconds, which is fast enough so that our end users hardly notice and ensures we meet our SLAs for the organisation.”
Throughout RPA’s use of DocAve, Cuthbert knew he could count on AvePoint’s technical support team whenever help was needed. “AvePoint responds to my support requests speedily and always provides a knowledgeable technician,” Cuthbert said. “Many software vendors leave a lot to be desired in this area, but AvePoint is the exception.”
The Road Ahead
As its SharePoint environment continues to grow and house even more important business data for the organisation, RPA will continue to rely upon DocAve for protection. “DocAve has saved quite a few headaches for our end users,” Cuthbert said. “When they are happy, I am happy.”
