Learn how Custom365 uses AvePoint Policies & Insights to identify risks in clients' environments and saves 100 hours of manual work every month

The AvePoint Solution

When Ian learned about AvePoint Policies & AvePoint Insights, he found that it was a game-changer for Custom365, providing massive time savings by automating what used to take 100 hours of manual work a month with CSV files. Policies & Insights enable managed service providers to seamlessly manage risks in their clients’ Microsoft 365 environments. With actionable security dashboards, MSPs have a single-pane-of-glass to monitor risk and access controls, track exposures and policy violations, and aggregate sensitivity and activity data to prioritize critical issues for action and remediate risk in bulk.

Custom365 has found Policies & Insights to be invaluable in identifying risks in their clients’ environments. In fact, every time they run a scan in a client’s environment, Custom365 finds some risk that needs to be remediated, whether shadow users, Teams sprawl, or – in the case of one client – over 35,000 anonymous shared links in a single Microsoft 365 tenant.

In one instance, the products helped Custom365 discover that a former employee of one of their customers had been stealing business information. This individual had shared all his business files to his personal email account after being dismissed and continued to access the content even though he were terminated from the job.

With AvePoint, Custom365 was not only able to uncover this but also prove the employee was accessing information after termination. Ian says, “This is why guest user management is so important. If they had been using Policies & Insights before this incident occurred, they would have been able to catch it in real-time, at the point when data was shared externally, instead of only discovering it after the damage was done."

A major advantage of Policies & Insights is that Custom365’s clients can see and use it, unlike most other managed services that are often "behind the scenes" and not visible to clients. Ian trains champions from his clients’ organizations how to use Policies & Insights themselves to manage guest users, shadow users, orphaned Teams, and other exposures. The best part is, “These users don’t need to be global admins, so they can’t make changes that will affect the infrastructure of the environment.”

Ian believes that the true benefit of Policies & Insights lies in its ability to open doors for Custom365 with potential new clients. It serves as a valuable conversation starter during meetings with business owners who may not have considered the risks associated with using SharePoint and Teams without visibility. "When we use Policies & Insights to identify risks and suggest solutions," he explains, "it generates new business opportunities with every conversation."

In addition to providing valuable services to their clients, Custom365 has formed a successful partnership with AvePoint, citing the trust they have in AvePoint solutions, the easy and predictable cost model, and the ease of purchasing through a distributor. “The AvePoint team is great to work with, really forward-thinking and progressive in the space, and reliable when it comes to my customer data.”