Airways New Zealand gets compliance done right with Office 365

Published on July 11, 2018

Summary

Airways New Zealand is New Zealand’s air traffic control and navigation service provider and a state-owned enterprise. They deliver air navigation and air traffic management consultancy and training services throughout New Zealand and in more than 65 countries. They are subject to the government’s Public Records Act of 2005 (PRA) as well as strict regulations across the civil aviation, health and safety industries. Starting in 2015, the enterprise started its move from an aging on-premise infrastructure to the cloud while achieving compliance with strict civil aviation and government regulations such as the PRA and the Health and Safety Reform Bill of 2016.

Challenge

In moving to the cloud, Airways needed to ensure electronic records were compliant and meeting Archive New Zealand’s Mandatory Standards for Public Records. Protecting against the loss of records from unintentional user errors, like accidental deletion, was also mission critical for the government entity.

Compliance wasn’t the sole ambition for the Airways Digital Information team. They also needed to increase audit reporting efficiencies, end-user adoption and maintain an organized collaboration environment. “Our role is helping people be proactive in Office 365,” said Jenny Ryan, a Digital Information Analyst with Airways.

Strategy

Airways examined a variety of third-party solutions before ultimately turning to AvePoint. Airways chose AvePoint for their comprehensive suite of solutions for their Office 365 environment. Airways saw that these solutions would extend the value of their Office 365 investment, enabling strict compliance controls and overall document lifecycle management. Upon demonstration of the AvePoint products, the Airways decision makers were impressed with the ease of use and knew the Digital Information team would help champion adoption.

AvePoint implemented their governance and records compliance solutions to keep Airways on track with their business initiatives. In Office 365, Airways needed to supplement the native backup capabilities. “We need to have the ability to restore item level email and OneDrive content, in addition to documents stored in SharePoint,” said Ryan. The value of AvePoint’s solutions were recognized immediately, when an employee left the company with critical information still living on their OneDrive. Thanks to AvePoint Cloud Backup, the Airways Digital Information Team was able to recover important documents that otherwise would have been lost.

AvePoint’s Cloud Governance and GroupHub solutions were also implemented to organize, delete, manage and clean up the Airways Groups environment, before using the Cloud Governance tool to allow users to create their own, PRA compliant Groups without needing to involve the Digital Workplace team. “We want to make it easy to use a compliant environment,” said Ryan. “Our plan is that if someone wants a SharePoint site or Group, Cloud Governance can help them fill out a questionnaire to label everything for them and get approval, so they can self-serve to improve productivity.”

Results

Airways New Zealand wanted an easy-to-use compliant environment. They are looking forward to saving time and the ability to do things they could not do before, with more reporting, capacity and flexibility. Airways New Zealand aims to be a prime example of compliance done right thanks to Office 365 and AvePoint solutions. Here are some of the results they’ve had so far:

  • On track to execute a compliant migration with a thorough discovery process by 2019
  • Restored important files stranded on a former employee’s OneDrive
  • Leading the way in how to achieve PRA compliance in a cloud environment
  • Increased records management efficiency and reporting
  • Proactively governing the provisioning, lifecycle and expiration of more than 280 Office 365 Groups
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