Thermo Fisher Scientific Replaces Custom Tool, Eliminates Provisioning Tickets with Cloud Governance
Success Highlights
Elimination of provisioning requests through the use of a self-service portal - reducing total tickets by 50%
Increased secure collaboration with automated recertification & lifecycle management for Office 365 workspaces
Implementation of a questionnaire & logical tree to determine needs and automatically provision
Customer Location Waltham, Massachusetts
Industry Retail
Platform Microsoft 365
Thermo Fisher Scientific is a multi-billion dollar American biotechnology product development company located in Waltham, Massachusetts.
Created in 2006 by the merger of Thermo Electron and Fisher Scientific, they employ more than 75,000 people. Their mission is to enable its customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer.
Critical Needs
- Lifecycle management for Office 365 Teams, Groups, and SharePoint sites
- Entire site collection restoration over a one-year retention period
The Challenge
Office 365 underpins Thermo Fisher’s modern workplace. The biotech company now leverages OneDrive for Business, Microsoft Teams recently moving from classic to modern SharePoint.
During this move, IT manager Deepa Ravindran, and her team took the opportunity to take a step back and analyze their needs. They immediately realized they had three challenges:
• Their relatively small IT team was burdened by SharePoint site provisioning tickets
• They had almost 12 thousand SharePoint sites that lacked any governance or lifecycle management; and
• They did not have a solution to restore a site collection for a full year retention period.
Initially, they tried to leverage a fully custom third-party solution, but “It was not user friendly,” said Ravindran
The automatic provisioning, lifecycle management, and anything we do being intact with recertification… it’s a night and day difference.
IT Manager, Thermo Fisher Scientific
The AvePoint Solution
Thermo Fisher evaluated multiple solutions to address their challenges.
“…But we found AvePoint provides a far better solution and easy usability for us that just directly satisfied our need,” said Ravindran.“ AvePoint’s Governance solution had a better touch-free lifecycle management and it complemented AvePoint’s backup solution.”
Cloud Governance’s self-service questionnaire and catalog of Office 365 services has helped Thermo Fisher’s users collaborate more effectively.
“Some people won’t really know what they want so instead of coming to [IT] right away, now it’s all taken care of through that questionnaire tree and self service portal,” said Ravindran. “The questionnaires provide an easy walk-through for the team to identify ‘ok what do I need.’“
Once the SharePoint site, Team team or other Office 365 workspace is provisioned, Thermo Fisher’s governance and lifecycle policies are automatically applied to the corresponding Office 365 Group.
“After the automatic provisioning, the other thing is the lifecycle management and anything we do is intact with recertification,” said Ravindran. “That’s a direct benefit…and it’s a night and day difference."
Outcomes
Thermo Fisher’s IT tickets plummeted after deploying Cloud Governance, making their IT team more efficient.
“Recently with our metrics our support tickets have gone down 50 percent, and none of our current tickets are for provisioning a site [so a big burden on our IT team] is gone,” said Ravindran.
Overall, Thermo Fisher is pleased with their implementation of Cloud Backup and Cloud Governance.
“You guys are awesome and always go above and beyond,” said Ravindran. “You go the extra step to make sure it’s all completed and 100 percent fool-proof so we are ready for production."
Thermo Fisher is now resting assured that they're able to sustain and foster more adoption across their environment.
