Case Studies Hāpaitia Limited

Hāpaitia Limited Enhances Governance and Security in a Shared Microsoft Tenant for Public Sector Customers with AvePoint

Success Highlights

Automated governance minimizes the need for manual intervention

Lifecycle management reduces the risk of sprawl and ensures data is appropriately managed and retained

Ongoing and automated reporting ensures compliance and security

Protection of 7.5+ TB of data in Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365

Customer Location Wellington, New Zealand

Industry Public Sector

Platform Microsoft 365

Hāpaitia Limited is an IT service provider for the Ohu Ahumahi, a group of eight workforce development councils in New Zealand. Ohu Ahumahi’s mission is to support the councils in creating a greater voice in the vocational education system, improving education pathways, and ensuring the industry’s future skills needs are met. As a public corporation owned by the councils, Hāpaitia provides shared managed services to meet the digital workplace needs of government organizations.

Critical Needs

• Reduce IT management burden

• Prevent workspace sprawl

• Security and compliance reporting

• Comprehensive backup and restore of Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 data

The Challenge

IT service provider Hāpaitia Limited manages the shared Microsoft 365 tenant for eight workforce development councils in New Zealand. While the councils share a Microsoft tenant, each has different processes and requirements that Hāpaitia must meet.

To manage the eight councils’ IT needs, Hāpaitia relied on manual processes. Staff would receive requests via email and carry out tasks like inviting guest users, requesting new SharePoint sites, and creating new Teams manually. However, this approach was labour-intensive, time-consuming, and lacked the necessary security and reporting features needed for public sector organizations.

To address these challenges, Hāpaitia sought to find a governance solution that could automate their processes, consolidate their workflows, and provide the necessary reporting features to ensure compliance and security.

The AvePoint Solution

Hāpaitia’s first step was implementing a governance framework. With AvePoint Cloud Governance, Hāpaitia can automate the delivery of a wide range of IT services while managing content ownership, policies, and lifecycle according to evolving business needs.

By establishing automated workflows in Cloud Governance for everyday tasks like provisioning new SharePoint sites and Teams or adding guest users to a workspace, Hāpaitia was able to streamline their processes while ensuring that requests are reviewed and approved by the IT team. This significantly reduced the time and effort spent on management for the Hapaitia team.

The shared tenant for multiple customers required careful management; Cloud Governance allowed Hāpaitia to associate each new request with its specific council, enabling them to understand resource demands by the council while also maintaining ownership of each new site, reducing the risk of sprawl and orphaned sites.

Once the new process was established and successful, Hāpaitia imported the councils’ existing Teams and sites into Cloud Governance to retroactively apply the newly established governance conditions, ensuring a consistent framework across all workspaces while identifying any overlooked governance concerns in the existing workspaces.

Hāpaitia used AvePoint Insights and AvePoint Policies to address reporting and security concerns. AvePoint Insights provides standard, templated security reports for all councils, including information about permissions and access, to help them understand current risks in their environments. Automatically running a few times a day, Insights scans for risks like inactive guest users, external users in internal sites, and orphaned users, offering valuable insights into the councils’ environment without requiring manual intervention.

Hāpaitia then used AvePoint Policies to enforce standards to control and secure the councils’ digital environment. They set policies – like mandating every Team needs at least two owners or prohibiting external users in internal teams – and if the solution detects configuration drift, it automatically reverts it and notifies the IT team. This ensured that the councils’ digital environment remained secure and compliant with public sector regulations.

Finally, to protect the Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 data of the six councils, Hāpaitia used AvePoint Cloud Backup. The cloud-to-cloud backup solution offers four automatic backups daily and provides built-in storage, encryption, and efficient restores. With customizable retention policies to meet public sector compliance regulations and enhance the councils’ business continuity strategy, this solution seamlessly protected all Teams chats, files, and pages.

The Road Ahead

Prior to implementing the AvePoint solutions, Hāpaitia’s small IT team manually controlled everything related to IT for the councils, including provisioning workspaces, using PowerShell scripts for security reports, and reviewing permissions and user activity. This approach significantly strained their resources and made it challenging to keep up with the councils’ diverse demands.

The AvePoint solutions have enabled Hāpaitia to reduce manual activities without sacrificing security or control. They have also resulted in significant time and cost savings, maximizing resources and freeing up time to focus on other important tasks. Hāpaitia’s experience with the solutions has been positive, and they have reported increased efficiency and reduced stress on their IT team.