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Thirteen Group is a landlord and housing developer that provide homes for rent and sale. They manage 34,000 properties from North Yorkshire to York.

We are thrilled to have been Thirteen's chosen technology partner for several digital transformation projects over the years, helping them find more efficient, modern and less expensive ways of working.

Results

Through boxxe's Backup as a Service with Druva, we helped Thirteen deploy a flexible, secure way to back-up and restore its business-critical Microsoft 365 data.

In fact, Thirteen’s IT team can now recover lost or deleted files 95% faster – taking minutes instead of hours. The solution simplifies the location and recovery of specific data points, no matter how granular.  This is crucial as UK GDPR laws give people the ‘right to be forgotten,’ meaning anyone can ask Thirteen to erase all records containing their personal data.

Previously, these requests required hours of trawling through physical tape. With Druva, the team can find all records in minutes, saving valuable time while staying compliant. The ever-present threat of a ransomware attack used to be a serious concern of Hassan’s team.

95%
faster
Recovering files

Thirteen’s IT team can now recover lost or deleted files 95% faster – taking minutes instead of hours.

< 5
minutes
Finding records

Requests required hours of trawling through physical tape. With Druva, the team can find all records in minutes, saving valuable time while staying compliant.

100%
compliant
GDPR regulations

Thirteen have the ability to complete 'right to be forgotten' requests in minutes.

House plans displayed on tablet

Challenge

Four years ago, Thirteen began its cloud journey by moving to Microsoft 365 using Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams for closer collaboration, and the large-scale storage of business-critical data.

However, Thirteen relied on Microsoft’s out-of-the-box recycling, in which deleted files are only held for 90 days by default. This put the organisation at risk for irrecoverable data loss.

Microsoft operates a shared responsibility model, meaning it is responsible for protecting the platform while its customers are responsible for long-term data retention. 

Without secure backups in place, Thirteen risked data loss to accidental deletion, platform disruption, or ransomware. It had to replace insufficient tools and processes to respond to the increasing volume, and variety of threats.

Plan

For Thirteen's IT team, the top priority for data protection was cloud-native capability.

Thirteen Group approached boxxe as they were looking to protect their SharePoint Online environment and users’ Microsoft 365 data. 

Their challenge was backing up large volumes of data into the cloud, and providing resiliency from the Microsoft ecosystem. 

Approach

With our understanding of Thirteen's challenges and the solutions available in the marketplace, partnering with Druva to deliver this solution was the immediate choice.

Druva is built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which was key for the team because it enabled them to achieve complete separation between Microsoft 365 data on Microsoft Azure and its backups. 

Furthermore, backups cut ties with original data, protecting against corruption if a security breach occurs. 

Additionally, Thirteen, not Druva, manages the keys to encryption for data at rest, giving the organisation complete control and privacy.

Outcome

Druva provides the Thirteen team peace of mind, protecting backups against infection, as single sign-on (SSO), multi-factor authentication (MFA), and role-based access controls (RBAC) isolate and control data access to guard against infection and encryption.

With Druva, the team know exactly how the company will recover affected Microsoft 365 data when, not if, a ransomware attack happens.

Working with boxxe has been a fantastic experience, they saw my vision and brought it to life, adding their own innovative and forward thinking ideas. It’s paved the way to Thirteen Group being Microsoft-first in our future developments.

Jayne Allport
Head of Service, Systems & Application Improvement
Thirteen Group

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