USC mitigates compliance risks with Office 365 and AvePoint

Summary

The University of the Sunshine Coast (USC) is one of the world’s top 150 young universities and is ranked by students as one of Australia’s best universities for teaching quality and overall student experience. With the help of AvePoint, USC migrated to Office 365 and SharePoint. In the process, the University reduced compliance risk and created a seamless user experience with Office 365 and SharePoint.

Challenge

USC, a long-time DocAve user, migrated to Office 365 and needed a new set of solutions to manage SharePoint. As a public university with 1,500 unique SharePoint users, USC needed an environment that provided a seamless user-experience to enable their staff to provision collaboration sites based off existing, approved templates for projects and committees. They also wanted greater control over their environment as well as a backup and recovery solution.

Specifically, a solution that could enable centralized administration of SharePoint at multiple levels, along with a report center for security searches and audit reports. For this requirement, they were searching for a tool that could facilitate the distribution SharePoint metric reports to a wide variety of business units including IT, knowledge management, legal and more.

Finally, USC needed a backup and recovery tool for the 302 GB of data in their SharePoint environment that could restore granular items such as the properties of a SharePoint list.

Strategy

Having used AvePoint for their SharePoint on-prem environment, USC found using AvePoint’s cloud solutions, including AvePoint Cloud Backup and AvePoint Cloud Governance, was a no-brainer.

“AvePoint was the market leader, there really weren’t many comparable products at the time that we were reviewing our options,” said USC’s IT Solutions & Architecture Manager, Joshua Burne.

USC has been using AvePoint Cloud Governance to help their end users self-provision SharePoint sites. After implementing AvePoint Cloud Governance, they are now able to reduce risk and improve SharePoint Online data retention compliance. The University is now able to secure collaboration and empower users, enabling strict compliance controls and overall document lifecycle management. Additionally, AvePoint solutions can assist the University to reduce time in managing backups and restoring granular items, like the properties of a SharePoint list.

“We have a number of templates based on particular business use cases. We use Cloud Governance to drive a questionnaire for our staff which automates the technical provisioning of sites and associated security settings,” said Joshua. “The settings help ensure information is not accidently shared externally to our organization if not appropriate.”

Results

With AvePoint products, USC is able to provide a collaborative environment for their staff. With new reporting features and audit reports, USC is now able to reduce compliance risks for their organization, while offering their staff a seamless user experience. The solution enables the University’s end-users to self-provision SharePoint sites in policy. Additionally, USC reduced time in managing backups and can restore granular items, like the properties of a SharePoint list.

In the near future, USC looks forward to leveraging Cloud Governance when they implement Microsoft Teams, which they see as being a big part of their collaboration going forward.

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