INDUSTRY WATCH
TO FACILITATE SMOOTH COLLABORATION DURING THE GLOBAL PANDEMIC , THE CONSTRUCTION COMPANY INTRODUCED MICROSOFT TEAMS AS A COMMUNICATION PLATFORM ACROSS THE BUSINESS .
Just a few years ago , many jobs could be carried out on Swietelsky construction sites without the need for constant connections to the company ’ s IT . This is no longer the case . “ We are currently seeing a huge digitisation push in the construction industry ,” said Manuel Lehner , Head of IT Infrastructure at Swietelsky . “ Applications such as Building Information Modeling or even the use of drones and Augmented Reality glasses on construction sites require reliable data access at any location .”
The COVID-19 crisis has once again accelerated the digitisation of work processes at Swietelsky . To facilitate smooth collaboration during the global pandemic , the construction company introduced Microsoft Teams as a communication platform across the business . Initially , 5,500 Swietelsky employees used the solution primarily for online meetings . Specialists on site were able to quickly and easily exchange information with colleagues working from home or with service providers at other locations . Video chats with clients to coordinate changes at short notice were also now possible .
Employees quickly started to use Microsoft Teams to share documents such as construction plans and photos or to jointly edit contracts online . The platform increasingly became a knowledge repository and a project management tool . “ From the very beginning , we thought about how we could reliably protect data from cyber-risks and prevent possible data loss ,” said Lehner . “ It was important for us to retain complete data ownership . We want to decide for ourselves where we save information and how long we keep it .”
This presented a significant technical challenge : Microsoft Teams is not a standalone application , but a service that connects different resources from the Office 365 world . Users ’ data and content are stored in Exchange Online , SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business , among others . “ For this reason , it can be very time-consuming to find team content that has been accidentally deleted and make it accessible again ,” said Gunter Natschläger , IT Manager responsible for backup and virtualisation at Swietelsky . “ Consequently , we were looking for a solution that would enable comprehensive backup and fast recovery of all information in Microsoft Teams .”
Solution
Swietelsky scoured the market and evaluated Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 , among other solutions . Swietelsky was one of the first companies to gain access to the new Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Teams . “ We quickly realised that this solution met our requirements exactly ,” said Natschläger . “ Unlike other products , Veeam offers flexible storage options and allows us to backup all data from the cloud to our own data centre . The decisive factor was the ability to centrally backup all Microsoft Teams data , systematically search it and restore it granularly .”
Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 gives Swietelsky complete control over the diverse information shared and processed by its 5,500 Microsoft Teams users . The solution not only backs up data stored in SharePoint Online , Exchange Online and OneDrive for Business , it also accesses all relevant metadata via a native Microsoft API . This enables the solution to identify which data points are associated with which Teams channels . Microsoft Teams configurations , permissions , applications and tabs are also automatically backed up by Veeam .
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