How to Back Up Office 365 Data as Efficiently as Possible (Case Study)
The Challenge
GKM2 has recognized that most of their clients are experiencing a heavy IT workload. GKM2’s principal consultant, Michael Milad-Said, explained, “Prospects and clients are typically looking for a partner to help with productivity requirements like help desk and security.”
The majority of GKM2’s help desk workload is restoring a document or item. However, Microsoft’s native backup functionality can be an extensive process requiring the whole collection to be restored back to a previous point in time just to restore a single item.
“Our clients just need a solution that will back up the applications they use. The ability to easily search for the document and restore them in place is key for us,” said Milad-Said. “Sometimes we will even restore the document ourselves and send it directly to the client since it’s so fast and adds a personal touch.”
Milad-Said and GKM2 can confidently say that their due diligence in evaluating backup solutions has been done.
“We tried nearly every Office 365 Backup solution on the market. We’ve evaluated over five different solutions in the last two to three years,” said Milad-Said.
Other third-party backup solutions GKM2 previously utilized had issues with scaling and restoring data.
“We had clients who were backing up one terabyte and we were hitting limits for snapshots. Sometimes a snapshot wouldn’t even finish in a day! Additionally, the dashboard would show us that the backups were successful, but when we tried to restore that data, the company would tell us that our backups failed or never completed,” said Milad-Said.
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“We chose AvePoint’s Cloud Backup for the reporting and restore capabilities along with the ability to backup additional applications like Microsoft Teams and Planner. A lot of companies seem to only backup email and documents,” said Milad-Said.
AvePoint Cloud Backup’s alerts also help GKM2 provide responsive service to their clients.
“With the AvePoint platform, we get alerted if anything has an issue. And it’s all extremely accurate. AvePoint’s reporting is very transparent and flexible in terms of restoration and searching, especially around Microsoft,” said Milad-Said.
Cloud Backup enables up to four incremental backups per day. This gives GM2K the ability to perform a more specific restoration depending on how frequently content is being updated and changed.
“Even though our customers just need a regular daily backup, we perform backups every six hours. Some other solutions we have used couldn’t even finish one backup a day,” said Milad-Said.
The Bottom Line
AvePoint provides a Cloud Backup solution specifically for MSPs so they can manage multiple clients and tenants. GMK2 has been able to leverage the solution and grow its Office 365 business by packaging it as a separate offering for its clients.
“GMK2 sells Cloud Backup as a separate offering. It’s so simple that it doesn’t cost any extra time to sell and implement it separately,” said Milad-Said.
Cloud Backup has also lowered GMK2’s risk when managing client data.
“It’s not just the time savings that’s valuable, but also reducing the risk to protecting our clients’ data,” said Milad-Said. “An unknown failed backup with the previous tools could have damaged our reputation and even resulted in a lawsuit.”
GMK2 is also evaluating other MSP solutions in AvePoint’s product portfolio such as Cloud Management.
“We’re beginning to use Cloud Management. We just recently restructured 700 gigabytes of content from tenant to tenant.”
The cherry on top, Michael went on to explain, is how responsive AvePoint has proven to be. “You guys are extremely agile. I went back to support with a bug I had found, which was fixed globally within 24 hours. It’s great support.”
GKM2 Solutions
GKM2 is a boutique Sydney, Australia based next-generation Microsoft Technology Partner and specialist managed IT services provider (MSP). They focus on virtual and physical infrastructure; Microsoft and Office 365; cloud solutions such as Microsoft Azure; and backup and disaster recovery platforms that enable efficiency, security, and cost-effectiveness in the event of data loss, disaster, or a ransomware outbreak.
Providing managed services from implementation to full ownership, GKM2 is supporting over 1,000 Office 365 seats and approximately 10 terabytes of content.
Read the full case study here.
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