Ovative Group saves $24K in storage costs using Syskit Point in under 60 minutes
Customer
Ovative Group is an independent media and measurement firm that helps clients drive and deliver measurable marketing performance. Founded in 2009 by Dale Nitschke, Ovative brings media, measurement, and consulting together under one roof to measure the holistic impact of marketing on clients’ total business using its proprietary metric, Enterprise Marketing Return (EMR).
Ovative’s team of marketing experts serves as a trusted partner for its national world-class client base of marketing leaders across many industries. Ovative is recognized as an industry leader and has received awards, including Digiday Technology’s Best Marketing Analytics Platform, Adweek Fastest Growing Agencies, Star Tribune’s Top Workplaces, Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal’s Fast 50, and Inc. 5000.
For more information about Ovative, visit ovative.com or follow Ovative on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
I'm really impressed with how Syskit Point keeps getting better with new features. It shows they're not just stopping at good enough, but always striving to give you more value.
Scott Dyer, Senior Director of Information Technology, OvativeChallenge
Handling external collaboration and rising costs of storage
As a client service business, Ovative depends heavily on external sharing and collaboration with its vast network of stakeholders. External sharing poses various security risks, including an increased chance of oversharing and compliance breaches.
Since reporting, alerting, and management actions with out-of-the-box Microsoft tools are scattered across multiple admin centers, Ovative didn’t have a centralized and efficient way of controlling access management.
Their IT team, led by Scott Dyer, Senior Director of Information Technology, identified the blind spots. They aimed to strike a balance between allowing their coworkers to collaborate flexibly and implement appropriate control measures. To do that, they had to ensure workspace visibility.
On top of that, Ovative is a rapidly growing company in terms of the number of employees and clients, and the amount of data it produces. In the past, the IT team would approve and buy more storage according to company needs to ensure business continuity.
Ovative had no storage limitations set. Also, they would buy 20 TB of extra storage to cover future needs at the time of contract renewal. However, accelerated growth entailed a steep rise in needed storage and costs. Additionally, they faced workspace sprawl in the form of Groups and Sites over-creation.
Ovative’s IT team researched the market and evaluated available tools to address these challenges. Ovative has been using Syskit Point for the past three years to manage its environment efficiently.
Solution
Improved security posture and access management control
The key to efficient and secure M365 management is visibility, centralized overview, and automation.
By utilizing reporting (User Access, Externally Shared Content, External Users, Audit Logs, Sharing Links, etc.), Ovative gained a detailed overview of its environment, which was the precondition to enforce OneDrive and SharePoint governance.
They set up site and tenant-level alerts to control (external) sharing activities, which was vital to ensure flexible collaboration while improving security posture and curtailing oversharing. Security and Compliance Checks notify them of any anomalies in the system (such as inactive guest users, workspaces with shadow users, orphaned users, etc.) and enable them to remedy security misalignments immediately.
Also, visibility in the tenant supports them in reducing workspace sprawl. They have improved control over creating unnecessary Groups and Teams that already have designated workspaces. By doing this, they are reducing sprawl and enhancing employee experience by ensuring they have proper access to the necessary workspaces.
"Syskit Point makes it easy to ensure different sharing policies and controls are in place. It’s important to us to have a clear view of what is being shared and with whom and be able to control the guest user lists and memberships."
Storage optimization
With the Storage Management feature, they can:
- Analyze trends in storage consumption and get insights to determine their storage limits,
- Gain insights into how much storage they can save per site,
- Execute fast and easy clean-up of outdated file versions.
The Storage Metrics Report provides a comprehensive overview of the percentage of storage used by their tenant, the ability to track storage usage over time, and the ability to detect the largest sites. With Site Storage Metrics and File Storage Metrics, users can gain deep insights into how their storage is used (by specific file types) and see how much storage it is possible to save if deleting file versions older than a certain number of months, except the most recent ones. They can complete the clean-up and free space from one centralized place.
Simplified management and enabled automation
Having all information in a centralized dashboard paired with management actions saves time and money. The user-friendly dashboard displays all the essential tiles in one place and enables users to manage or delegate tasks quickly.
Eliminating time-consuming manual tasks ensures that the IT team’s resources are devoted to mission-critical projects that add more value to the company.
“This year, our storage consumption doubled, which meant tens of thousands of dollars in additional storage. I went to the Storage Management tile in Syskit Point and, in under one hour, saved approximately 24 thousand dollars. A really powerful and helpful feature!”
Results
By implementing measures to keep Group and Site memberships updated more frequently, Ovative significantly enhanced security and compliance, effectively curtailing the risk of oversharing.
This bolstered their defenses against potential breaches and reduced the time spent managing the environment. As a result, resources were freed up to focus on value-added projects, optimizing productivity, and driving innovation within the organization.
Using Storage Management, Ovative cleaned up its file versioning and saved $24K in under 60 minutes!
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1.Cost savings and optimized storage management
Ovative saved $24K in storage costs so far. By tracking usage, they can make data-driven decisions on their storage consumption.
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2.Access management and external sharing under control
They enabled their coworkers to work freely with external collaborators, but implemented all the proper controls to curb oversharing and data leaks.
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3.Focus on strategy
Syskit Point provided them more time to work on essential projects and eliminate doing manual tasks by having the centralized dashboard and automation available.
“I couldn’t imagine going back to the previous set-up. We’d have to either devote a lot of time doing mundane tasks or hire a PowerShell expert to develop tons of custom scripts. Not to mention the huge storage cost savings we’ll achieve with the new storage metrics functionality.”
Scott Dyer, Senior Director of Information Technology, Ovative