Case Study: SOAS University of London achieves fast, granular SharePoint Online backups and restores with AvePoint DocAve Online

School of Oriental and African Studies Saves Time Protecting Microsoft® Office 365 SharePoint Online Data for 7,000 Users with DocAve® Online

The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, needed a better way to protect and manage SharePoint Online for its 1,000 staff and 6,000 incoming students. Running an on‑premises SharePoint had become a burden for a small IT team, and native Office 365 backup options—12‑hour backups, site‑collection‑level restores, and 30‑day recycle bin retention—didn’t provide the granular, point‑in‑time restore and flexible scheduling SOAS required.

SOAS implemented DocAve Online, a fully hosted SaaS solution, to run scheduled weekly full and daily incremental backups to on‑premises storage and enable item‑level restores in minutes. The change reduced recovery time and management overhead, avoided additional staff or costly cloud storage, and freed IT to focus on optimizing the platform and onboarding users—delivering faster restores, greater control, and lower ongoing maintenance.

SOAS University of London

Martin Whiteside

Assistant Director of Information Systems