East Aurora School District

"Synology C2 provided the best backup solution for our 2,000 M365 accounts. Compared to other systems that are overly complex and expensive, C2 occupies a sweet spot, providing great technology at a great price point."

Andrew Allen, Executive Director of Information Systems, East Aurora School District

The Company

East Aurora School District 131 (EA131) is a large school district in Illinois, serving over 13,500 students across 23 schools in the east side of Aurora.

The Challenge

EA131 uses Microsoft 365 services like OneDrive and Outlook for employee's work and email. The school district wanted to retain that employee data for years beyond what the built-in retention policy of these cloud services could provide.

Additionally, most enterprise-grade cloud backup options that would satisfy EA131's conditions were cost-prohibitive and required extensive training for employees to use. EA131 needed a scalable, intuitive, and cost-effective backup solution to retain emails and work stored in the cloud over long periods of time.

The Solution

EA131 chose Synology C2 Backup for Business, a cloud service for backing up PCs, physical servers, and Microsoft 365 data from a central web portal.

With C2 Backup for Business, EA131 was able to batch-configure automatic backup tasks for over 2,000 OneDrive accounts that saved time-stamped versions of each account at regular intervals. They also established automatic backups for all employee email accounts and then set district-wide retention policies for their backups to match their retention goals.

The Benefits

Using Synology C2 Backup for Business, East Aurora now retains data belonging to their thousands of Microsoft 365 accounts spanning many years of employee work. The solution provides a longer retention period than was previously possible, significantly extending the recovery window for lost or stolen data.

Additionally, EA131 found a solution that is intuitive and reduces total training time for employees, giving them the ability to easily configure backup and retention policies for thousands of accounts simultaneously.

In case of data loss or accidental deletion, staff members can browse their account's backup versions and quickly recover individual files and folders. They also have the ability to restore mailboxes, email folders, or single emails in case critical emails go missing. Lastly, EA131 was able to save money compared to other cloud backup solutions.


Interested in exploring a solution like this one for your organization? Schedule a demo or consultation with our technical solutions experts.

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