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After initially looking at other tools and building a solution in-house, MTIA decided to investigate AvePoint’s Cloud Governance solution to automate the Teams governance process.
“We evaluated several solutions and none of them met all of our needs. We also considered developing our own solution but realized we didn’t have the time and it could cause ownership problems,” said Bator. “Cloud Governance was the highest available match to our requirements, and it was very important to us that AvePoint have a local presence and solution that was deployable in Australia.”
MTIA accelerated their deployment of Cloud Governance due to COVID-19, but they were able to benefit from their extensive work in building a governance structure. This included creating a standard governance baseline across the 5 project offices.
“Having done projects for a while, I know people always say their project is unique, but oftentimes they are really the same,” said Maschwitz. “We worked across our stakeholders to determine a common baseline, while offering them some operational flexibility. They can’t lower the governance requirements from the baseline, but they can add a layer of approvals for example.”
One key innovation was simplifying the numerous external interfaces and processes across projects into a customized questionnaire that mapped to four key governance policies.
“We saw the Teams approval process as an opportunity to get rid of waste and excess bureaucracy. Some projects were more conservative than others and it could take three or four approval cycles for a workspace to be created,” said Maschwitz. “We simplified the questionnaire in Cloud Governance’s Team app, MyHub, and based on how they answer the Team is automatically mapped to those four policies. For example, depending on the user’s input the Team will be archived after it is inactive for 120, 90 or 45 days (and the Team owner has not responded within two weeks to a recertification request).”
MTIA not only uses MyHub to guide users through the provisioning process, but they also use it for their governance administration as well as its ability to help users organize their workspaces.
“I’m extremely with happy with MyHub. Previously, everything had to go through IT because if you’re not part of the Team you don’t see it, private teams would be hidden, etcetera,” said Bator. With MyHub, users can easily see if what they want to create already exists and the details of the Team. It helps with deduplication and gives us insight into the whole environment without ever leaving Teams.”