Customer Interview: 5 Questions on Office 365 Backup with Risa AS
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Hey all! I recently had the pleasure of answering some Office 365 backup questions on behalf of Risa AS at the Breakfast Club in Stavenger. Here’s the mini Q&A in written form for your reference!
1. What role does your day-to-day position play in your organization’s modern workplace?
I’m responsible for IT at Risa. I’m in charge of everything from phones to software to platforms for collaboration. My job is all about ensuring that Risa is ahead of the digital curve.
Naturally, backup plays a major factor in my role. Everybody expects IT to be able to restore nearly any data that they might lose. My job is basically to prove them right ?.
2. Can you tell us a bit about where Risa AS is in its Office 365 journey?
Risa adapted to Office 365 pretty well (leaving out all other options did help, of course!). I’d say the hardest part of the journey was not being able to access the application suite natively. We don’t actively use OneDrive sync, so the mindset to go to the web for everything needed to be set. We had been using SharePoint On-Premises before the migration, however, so it wasn’t a completely unfamiliar concept.
Fast forward to today and we’re 100% in Office 365 and Azure. We’ve managed to become a completely cloud-first organization. Employees can access all of the Office 365 applications directly from their web browsers. This includes SharePoint Online, Microsoft Teams, Exchange, Skype for Business, etc. We also just started using Power BI.
Looking for an Office 365 backup case study? This is worth a read: Click To Tweet3. With the adoption of Office 365, what critical needs led you to seek a third-party solution provider for backup?
The ability to be able to restore at any time is a huge advantage for us. We produce a lot of content all the time, so having unlimited backup for all our needs was very important. We especially wanted to avoid any accidental deletion caused by users.
We needed to be completely sure we didn’t lose data during our 100% move to the cloud. We didn’t feel that the out-of-the-box solutions gave us that, so we had to find a third party vendor. This resulted in us choosing AvePoint and having them add additional features to their Cloud Backup solution to accommodate us.
Another key reason was security. The leaderboard would not approve our move to Office 365 without a solid backup and restore solution in place. Given that we were moving everything to Office 365, we wanted the security of knowing that our data would be securely backed up by AvePoint. We also liked that we could retrieve anything from yesterday or ten years ago.
4. How much data are you actively backing up?
Right now we have 4TB of data in Exchange and 1TB in SharePoint Online across 500 users.
5. What’s your current retention policy?
It’s currently set to a maximum of 93 days.
About Risa AS
Risa AS, the major subsidiary of Risa Group, is a Norwegian contracting company with a wide range of services within infrastructure solutions.
Examples of our services are road and groundworks including tunnels, establishing infrastructure within the energy industry, water and drainage solutions, and road maintenance (including wintertime services). Our services also include rock protection and railway infrastructure. In recent years we’ve also have established specialized competence within the demolition space and other environment-related services.
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Thomas has worked in IT for his entire adult life. He’s a self-procalimed cloud fanatic and burns for the user experience.
