How Sitowise Solved Their Office 365, SharePoint Online Backup Challenge
Critical Needs
- Data backup
- Unified document management experience
![Sitowise]()
- Customer Location Espoo, Finland
- Industry Construction
- Platform Microsoft 365
- AvePoint SolutionsCloud ManagementBackup & RestoreDocAve
Success Highlights
- Because of FileShare Navigator, Sitowise’s employees can enjoy the benefits of a single widely-accessible, document management portal without the company needing to incur the costs or disruption of migrating.
- With AvePoint Cloud Backup, Sitowise was able to extend the duration its archived data was retained beyond the 30 days provided out-of-the-box by Office 365.
- Project data in Office 365 can be backed up and retrieved years later, which is often a legal or contractual requirement for the company.
The easy set up and implementation of Cloud Backup and FileShare Navigator has really helped with the challenges we faced during our merger.
The easy set up and implementation of Cloud Backup and FileShare Navigator has really helped with the challenges we faced during our merger.
The Challenge
Following the merger, Sitowise found itself inheriting two separate and siloed document management environments: an on-premise file share and SharePoint Online. These environments needed to be properly protected and comply with the data retention requirements of their contracted projects.
The organization had tens of thousands of documents spread across their on-premise file share server, which was the interface much of their company was accustomed to using. However, having two separate environments was creating a disjointed experience and making it difficult to find information.
After deeming a full migration to SharePoint Online to be too disruptive to the end-user experience, and fully duplicating information on both file servers to be impractical, Sitowise found a better way with AvePoint solutions.
The AvePoint Solution
Sitowise is concluding a month-long 100-user test phase with AvePoint’s FileShare Navigator, which enables files to be accessed through SharePoint regardless of whether they live there or in the on-premise file share system.
“FileShare Navigator provides noticeable benefits to our employees who now don’t have to access their files in a different manner from SharePoint Online,” said Juho Kokko, Systems Specialist, Sitowise. ”They can keep working as they have done before, but now we have removed siloes and made it accessible outside of the company’s network.”
As a result, Sitowise is planning to rapidly expand FileShare Navigator to cover the rest of the company. This will bridge the two environments and consolidate access to all enterprise-wide content allowing all files, even rich media files larger than 10 GB, to be accessible through one interface.
“Office 365 doesn’t have any real file share synchronization feature natively, so FileShare Navigator has given us a lot of capabilities we didn’t have previously,” said Kokko.
Sitowise’s IT department also wanted to protect the company from losing critical business data.
“In some cases, critical project data might only exist in one user’s mailbox. We must be able to recover that data, even if that person left the company and the mailbox was deleted,” said Kokko.
With AvePoint Cloud Backup, Sitowise was able to extend the duration its archived data was retained beyond the 30 days provided out-of-the-box by Office 365. Cloud Backup also expedited Sitowise’s restoration times and enabled them to conduct out of place restores and save a single file to SharePoint Online or OneDrive.
The Bottom Line
Kokko estimates that Cloud Backup has reduced both the cost and time required to backup the company’s data by about 50 percent as compared to the on-premise solution they were previously using.
“The ease of use for the set up and implementation of Cloud Backup has really helped us with the challenges we faced during our merger,” said Kokko. “AvePoint’s backup service is much more flexible than the native Office 365 backup.”
And as a result of FileShare Navigator, Sitowise’s employees are able to enjoy the benefits of a single widely-accessible, document management portal without the company needing to incur the costs or disruption of migrating.
Sitowise has also benefitted from AvePoint’s world-class customer support.
“There was a small issue with FileShare Navigator that they worked on and the experience was pretty great. It didn’t take long at all to schedule a session and it was resolved pretty quickly,” said Kokko.
About Sitowise
Sitowise is a Finnish company with 1,200 employees formed through the merger of the Wise Group and Sito Oy. It is the largest Finnish-owned full-service housing, infrastructure and construction company. Sitowise began operating as a unified organization at the start of 2018.
