“The process to get HubStor fully up and running was amazingly easy and simple.”
MIKE NGUYEN, IT ADMINISTRATOR, BISHOP TECHNOLOGIES
The following interview was conducted July 12, 2016 with Mike Nguyen, IT Administrator, Bishop Technologies, after the successful deployment of their HubStor tenant.
Why did you deploy HubStor?
In preparing to help our enterprise and mid-market clients leverage Microsoft Azure for file server archiving, Bishop’s IT team wanted to run the HubStor service for our own internal file archiving and data protection needs.
What features do you find most valuable?
In addition to the search experience, we like how HubStor is a seamless extension of our infrastructure. Because it synchronizes with our directory, it makes it easy to deploy to our user community. And the access rights of our data synchronize to HubStor too, so there is no permissions work when we archive data to the cloud. Users see the same folders and have the same access in the cloud, and HubStor keeps our cloud archive up-to-date whenever we change permissions to our data on-premises.
Did you deploy HubStor into your own Azure account or under HubStor subscription?
We deployed HubStor into our own Azure account.
How easy or difficult was it to get HubStor fully up and running?
The process to get HubStor fully up and running was amazingly easy and simple. We started the process on a Monday morning and were into configuration and orientation the following day.
What did the process involve for you?
We already had our Active Directory synchronized to Azure AD for Office 365, so all we had to do to enable HubStor’s directory synchronization was authorize HubStor to connect with our Azure AD. HubStor’s technical staff guided us through that easily. Then we needed to create a service account and virtual machine for the HubStor Connector Service, which we installed in our environment to run archiving policies against our storage.
In the cloud, because we deployed HubStor into our own Azure account, we had to create a dedicated space within our account and give HubStor access. Beyond that, all of the setup and provisioning of our HubStor tenant into our Azure account was done by HubStor without issue.
Were there any surprises (good or bad)?
There were no surprises that came out at us.
What benefits of the service do you anticipate your clients will enjoy the most?
I anticipate that our clients with eDiscovery requirements will greatly benefit from the ability to index targeted subsets of their archived data. The whole cloud search experience with HubStor is incredibly simple compared to the indexing and search complexity that our clients have dealt with over the years. In this new approach, even when deployed into our own Azure account, the entire archiving and search infrastructure of HubStor is fully managed for you. All we have to do is create an indexing policy to tell HubStor what content should be full-text indexed. The search is really fast, and HubStor includes features for placing data on litigation hold, creating cases, and exporting data out of the cloud.
What added benefits can you provide to organizations that use HubStor?
Most of our clients are transitioning their email and legacy email archives to Office 365. But they never tackled the problem of file system archiving. We’re seeing a huge opportunity to help clients further reduce their IT costs by simply leveraging Microsoft Azure to archive low-touch data from network file shares. Data has been allowed to pile up there, in some cases for decades, and it’s a problem because it’s largely inactive data sitting on expensive storage. Getting it into HubStor reduces storage and backup costs on-premises, protects it from ransomware, and makes it easy to manage and search as needed. Bishop is now offering a managed service around this. The business case is an easy one.
