Discover how AvePoint's comprehensive suite of solutions and multi-tenant management platform help this partner meet customer needs and drive business growth.
Success Highlights
Customer Location Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Industry Information Technology
Platform Microsoft 365
Since 2008, Rapid Circle has been supporting organisations with the innovation of collaboration and the digital workplace, the transition to the cloud, and the improvement of service with Microsoft cloud technologies. Rapid Circle supports organisations in their digital transformation journey, offering tailor-made implementations of cloud-based technology to give organisations the means to thrive in this changing environment.
Critical Needs
- Comprehensive coverage for advanced workloads across Microsoft 365
- Quick, user-friendly restores for customers
- Flexible pricing model for licensing and storage
- Minimal annual maintenance required
The Challenge
Rapid Circle is a full-service Microsoft 365 partner, delivering support, guidance, and tools for every aspect of M365. While Microsoft offers out-of-the-box functionality to retain content, many of Rapid Circle’s customers need a more robust solution. Some simply wanted insurance their data was protected, but others needed to diversify storage or meet compliance regulations.
Loryan Strant, Product and Innovation Lead at Rapid Circle, says, “We even had a customer who was required by law to keep separate backups of all their emails containing payroll information to prove no one modified them.”
Easier recovery is another critical need of their customers. “The ability to restore lost content is a vital part of backup. Microsoft’s out-of-the-box functionality was not very end-user-centric, which is a big gap in capabilities.”
Some of their customers already worked with other third-party providers but weren’t happy with their solutions. “One customer used Skykick, but it was expensive and ‘clunky,’ according to them. After encountering support challenges and intermittent issues, they were not confident their data was protected.”
The service provider needed to find a solution that could fill the gaps, covering more workloads than native capabilities and offering more peace of mind than other third-party solutions.
If you partner with a traditional backup vendor, who won’t be able to help you with governance, policy reporting, or service management, you’ll end up with a bunch of point solutions. Instead, ask yourself ‘what else do I need from a vendor’ and choose one who is invested in the breadth of a platform like AvePoint.
Product and Innovation Lead, Rapid Circle
The AvePoint Solution
While Loryan has worked with many backup providers in the past, including Veaam, Synology, Veritas, Symantec, and Cloudiway, his backup solution of choice is AvePoint Cloud Backup.
AvePoint Cloud Backup is a comprehensive cross-platform, multi-cloud backup and restore solution. It features built-in, unlimited storage, encryption, flexible pricing plans, and more for M365, Salesforce, Google Workspace, Azure, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.
AvePoint Cloud Backup stood out from competitors because of its capabilities and scalability. Features like Cloud Backup’s unlimited storage have never been so critical as the cost of storage keeps increasing. Additionally, Loryan says, “Cloud Backup offers more flexibility than other solutions. It integrates well, and it doesn’t require considerably annual upkeep.”
Their customers also appreciate the multiple backups a day, as well as the ability to trigger an on-demand backup if needed. Because it’s an insurance policy they hope to never need, their customers appreciate how simple, scalable, and easy to use it is.
Rapid Circle leverages Elements Portal, AvePoint’s multi-tenant management platform, to safely implement and manage Cloud Backup for multiple customers without compromising control. “The portal is incredibly valuable,” Loryan says. “We never have to log in to our customers’ environments to do the work we need to do. We can spin up trials, onboard new clients, configure the service, manage licenses, access reports – all within the platform. It takes a lot of the load off us.”
AvePoint offers more than just backup and recovery for the service providers. The breadth of AvePoint’s suite of solutions allows Rapid Circle to extend the conversations they have with their customers.
“AvePoint’s portfolio of products deepens our relationships with customers because we can use these solutions to help them take their use of M365 farther,” Loryan says. “We can extend our management service capabilities and offer more value without simply relying on native capabilities or building something from scratch. We can go from ‘we have a vendor that does that thing’ to ‘this is how we can help you.’”
The Road Ahead
Overall, Loryan and his team are happy with their partnership with the AvePoint team. Their service experience has been “topnotch,” with quality responses and fast turnaround, and their customers find the AvePoint licensing model financially appealing, particularly compared to native options. Most of all, however, is the expertise his team has gained.
To other service providers, Loryan gives this advice: “Don’t look for the solution you need now, but the solutions you need in the future. If you partner with a traditional backup vendor, who won’t be able to help you with governance, policy reporting, or service management, you’ll end up with a bunch of point solutions. Instead, ask yourself ‘what else do I need from a vendor’ and choose one who is invested in the breadth of a platform like AvePoint.”
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