Learn how this leading healthcare provider in New Zealand achieves data protection, with data backup and recovery, and meets compliance with the help of AvePoint Cloud Backup.
Success Highlights
Comprehensive backup and recovery for millions of documents in Microsoft 365
Achieved full data protection in a matter of days with near-zero configuration
Significantly reduced data recovery times from, in some cases, up to a day to mere minutes
Easily meets compliance with better data retention and hands-off vendor storage
Customer Location Auckland, New Zealand
Industry Health Services
Platform Microsoft 365
Southern Cross Healthcare operates a nationwide network of wholly owned and partnership hospitals, specialist centers, diagnostic services, and community-based healthcare providers, with a focus on enabling better health for more New Zealanders.
In the 2023 financial year, over 100,000 patients received elective surgery, high-end diagnostics, and cancer treatment services through its network of 23 wholly owned or joint venture hospitals and medical facilities.
In addition, hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders rely on Southern Cross Healthcare and its joint ventures for rehabilitation, community-based physiotherapy, mental health, and corporate wellness services each year. Services across the network are offered to insurance-funded, ACC, publicly-funded, and self-paying patients.
Critical Needs
- Comprehensive backup and fast recovery of data
- Protection against ransomware attacks
- Compatibility and integration with granular Microsoft functionality
- Simple and light touch solution for IT and end users
The Challenge
As part of its digital transformation journey, Southern Cross Healthcare (Southern Cross) made a strategic move to Microsoft 365 and the cloud. With this shift, the Digital Services team recognized the need for a more efficient system for retaining and backing up data.
As a healthcare organization, Southern Cross must comply with specific privacy and data regulations, needing a solution to provide comprehensive backup and quick recovery while meeting data privacy needs.
“One of the benefits of using AvePoint Cloud Backup is that we can retain sensitive data from a regulatory perspective, which we couldn’t do with our Microsoft 365 license alone. Cloud Backup helps us make better use of our data and leverage the cloud-based tools to manage our data more efficiently.”
Project Manager, Southern Cross Healthcare
The AvePoint Solution
Steve Dunn, Project Manager at Southern Cross Healthcare, had previous positive experiences working with AvePoint products and customer service teams. Steve recommended AvePoint Cloud Backup to business leaders as a solution to meet their data protection needs.
After evaluating several options, Cloud Backup met the organization’s critical requirements, including fast restores, Teams chat backup, integration with Microsoft functionality, and light-touch management. Most importantly, though, the solution met its data privacy needs.
“With the use of Azure Key Vault or the option to bring your own encryption key, and by encrypting data in transit and at rest, Cloud Backup ensures that no unauthorized person can access this data, making it an ideal solution for Southern Cross Healthcare,” said Steve.
In addition, there were considerable cost savings to be had, with AvePoint Cloud Backup around 30 percent lower in cost compared to on-premises backup providers and other cloud-based alternatives.
Southern Cross agreed to move forward with the comprehensive, SaaS-based backup and restore solution. With near-zero configuration, SCHL had Cloud Backup up and running in a matter of days. The business has appreciated that the solution is easy to manage through the AvePoint Online Services portal. Steve explained, "Backup is a necessary evil. You don’t come to work looking forward to working on a backup solution every day, but Cloud Backup requires such a light touch that you can focus on other things.”
Since implementing Cloud Backup, Southern Cross has needed to complete several restores, primarily of user accounts. Recovering these accounts and all associated data manually would be time- and labor-intensive, if even possible. However, with Cloud Backup, they can be restored in their entirety, and what used to take a full day now only takes a few minutes.
Steve said this about customer service: “Everyone felt genuine, with an informal style that made meetings easy. There was a real sense that we’re working as a team to get things done rather than an external provider with a client. Overall, the customer service and experience were excellent.”
The Road Ahead
Southern Cross Healthcare needed a reliable and easy-to-use backup solution for its Microsoft 365 data, which was delivered via AvePoint Cloud Backup.
Steve offered this advice for those in the market for a backup provider: “AvePoint provides a straightforward, seamless way of moving backups to the cloud. It’s so simple to deploy, you get it up and running in a few days. It also gets implemented with a light touch, which is a big positive for your IT and staff.”
By providing a reliable backup solution that meets its critical requirements, Cloud Backup has enabled Southern Cross Healthcare to focus on other aspects of its digital transformation journey.
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