AvePoint Cloud Backup protects Office 365 for telecom group
AvePoint Cloud Backup protects about 200 GB of Office 365 data for a national telecommunications group. IT likes being able to run the product 'from anywhere.'
IT administrator Mark Nagie considered himself old-school. That is, he had always been a proponent of keeping all data on site.
That's not the case anymore, as Nagie, a server support manager for the National Exchange Carrier Association (NECA), uses AvePoint Cloud Backup for his company's SharePoint, Exchange and OneDrive data in Microsoft Office 365.
"If I have to do a restore, I don't have to be at my desk; I can be at home," Nagie said. "It makes my life a lot easier."
Nagie said he recognizes the limits of on-site backup and the worries that come with it regarding hardware, tapes and patches.
How NECA uses AvePoint backup
NECA, a membership association of U.S. local telecommunications companies based in Whippany, N.J., has been using AvePoint since 2012. Before adopting AvePoint for its SharePoint backup, Nagie said he looked at IBM Tivoli Storage Manager -- now called Spectrum Protect -- and other options.
If I have to do a restore, I don't have to be at my desk; I can be at home. It makes my life a lot easier.
Mark NagieServer support manager, National Exchange Carrier Association
NECA chose AvePoint backup because it had the lowest cost, it was the most flexible when backing up and restoring, and it had the fastest backup and restore times, Nagie said.
AvePoint is backing up about 200 GB of NECA's data per day -- about 100 GB of SharePoint and OneDrive data and 95 GB in Exchange. Its SharePoint data involves a range of sites and applications; OneDrive includes spreadsheets, documents and the occasional database; and Exchange covers email messages, calendars and attachments.
Applications in SharePoint are the most common type of workload to cause an issue, Nagie said, requiring AvePoint Cloud Backup to amend an accidental deletion or other mistake.
"Like any backups, it's saved us many times," Nagie said.
NECA, which uses NetApp SAN storage for primary data, backs up SharePoint and OneDrive twice a day. It backs up Exchange incrementally once a day, which takes about an hour and a half, Nagie said. AvePoint also does a lot of the backup scheduling.
John Hodges, vice president of product strategy at AvePoint, said its cloud-to-cloud backup takes on much of the technical burden that traditional backup vendors leave to users.
"We provide dynamic resource availability that allows us to scale up as needed to meet the customer's [service-level agreement], all running on Microsoft's networks for the best performance," Hodges said.
AvePoint Cloud Backup marks 'new way'
Hodges said AvePoint, based in Jersey City, N.J., works closely with Microsoft to make sure its products, including backup, cover every way a user could work with the cloud.
Founded in 2001, AvePoint focused on SharePoint backup and recovery to start, and it has since branched out to other areas, such as governance and compliance.
Hodges said Veeam is AvePoint's top competitor in the backup market. Nagie said NECA also uses Veeam for VMware workloads. In fact, Hodges noted that AvePoint uses Veeam internally.
The potential customer's decision-making also often comes down to the question of whether to stick with the familiar or go with a new type of service.
AvePoint has its own cloud, running on Azure infrastructure.
"This is just a new way of doing backups," Hodges said of the cloud-first, cloud-hosted AvePoint Cloud Backup.
Nagie said NECA has a lot of tapes that they once used for disaster recovery. Now, he can run AvePoint "from anywhere."
