How SimCorp manages data and permissions security in Microsoft 365 with ShareGate

The challenges

Manually managing data for over 2,000 users

In the relentlessly evolving world of fintech, being agile with data is paramount.

For SimCorp, the world’s leading provider of investment management solutions, that means keeping Microsoft 365, Teams, and SharePoint data well-organized and uncluttered.

But doing it manually was almost impossible, with the firm’s many years’ worth of documents and over 2,000 employees spread around the globe.

Principal IT Application Specialist Jacob Maegaard Siggard was responsible for supporting all of the applications in the Microsoft 365 suite. He explains why, after an initial migration from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint Online, the company kept using ShareGate to improve day-to-day data management.

“After our first migration, we realized it was very good to have this tool that gave us an overview of everything that had been migrated and all of the different permissions that were in place.”

That new visibility was key, because it shone light on a problem that SimCorp didn’t realize they had: cluttered data.

“When we migrated, we had a lot of teams and SharePoint sites, and we didn’t have a tool that could help us manage them. So they kept growing in numbers, and no one was deleting them.”

The accumulating data threatened to increase costs and reduce search efficiency for SimCorp’s users.

“Our Teams and SharePoint sites were growing in number, and no one was deleting them. The old content was messing up our search criteria, and users weren’t able to find what they were looking for.”

“We could see that at some point, we would reach the limit of our storage. The old content was also messing up our search criteria and search results. Users weren’t able to find what they were looking for because there was so much clutter.”

Knowing that ShareGate’s custom reporting and automated features would make it easy, Jacob and his team harnessed it to declutter SimCorp’s data and develop sustainable maintenance routines for their Microsoft 365 environment.

The solution

Efficiency-boosting visibility and automations

Right from the initial migration, ShareGate gave Jacob and his team a powerful overview of their SharePoint data and major time-saving efficiencies.

“We managed to move a lot of documents and get them all into the right place, including all the metadata and permissions. It went quite well and everything was processed smoothly. Without ShareGate, we would have spent months creating or migrating everything manually.”

Expanding to manage the full data lifecycle

Jacob’s team turned to ShareGate again one year later, when they began a project of migrating file shares to SharePoint Online.

“Another thing we rolled out to streamline our data was ShareGate’s features to manage the lifecycle of our SharePoint sites and teams.”

Organizing teams and cleaning up data clutter

In addition to developing more streamlined systems for organizing and sharing documents among different teams, ShareGate is helping SimCorp identify and eliminate a significant amount of unused sites.

“ShareGate’s reports created a lot of communication in our organization. Now, when a SharePoint or Teams site hasn’t been used for 90 days (or whatever amount of time I choose), the team owner gets a message from ShareGate asking them whether it should be kept, archived, or deleted. We can see that a lot of content is being deleted or archived, and that has been a huge success for us.”

Improving productivity with better search results

That reduction in data clutter is helping users find the documents they need faster.

“We’re constantly eliminating unnecessary content, and it’s making our environment much cleaner. We hear from our end users that it’s improving their search results. Without that old, inactive content getting in the way, they only get active and up-to-date information.”

The culling of old sites has also brought the company’s usage of data storage back to a sustainable level.

Avoiding complications from unregulated permissions

ShareGate’s automated external sharing reviewing feature has been critical in bringing permissions governance into focus.

“ShareGate notifies our team owners to make sure they review external sharing on a regular basis. Instead of them having to keep track manually, which they sometimes forget, they get a small reminder. It makes it much easier for them to manage. We’ve had a lot of feedback that they find it very helpful.”

Keeping access permissions up-to-date is helping SimCorp ensure that their proprietary and sensitive content remains private.

“If our users don’t review external sharing, it’s possible our content could get out of the company and into the hands of our other customers or our competitors. So we find that automated feature very helpful.”

ShareGate also brings visibility to orphaned teams, which happens when the team’s owner has left the role or the company. Orphaned teams can lead to clutter or even security risks, but ShareGate makes it easy for Jacob’s team to assign new owners when owners come and go.

“We couldn’t keep track of all that before. The only way we knew when someone had moved was when we got a request from a user saying that a team had no owner or needed a new owner. Now, it’s more structured and we keep track every week.”

A user-friendly tool that multiplies efficiency

Jacob says that ShareGate has become an important tool, and his ability to quickly ramp-up new users has been a blessing.

“It’s a very user-friendly tool. It’s easy to navigate around and figure out how to use. That’s very important for when I’m introducing it to new users who don’t have deep technical skills. It takes maybe a half-hour and then they are up and running.”

With his users able to quickly become independent on ShareGate, it takes pressure off of Jacob and frees him from intensive trouble-shooting.

“I’m part of the third-line support. That ease of use means we can move a lot of the support tasks related to moving content to our second line, and that’s very helpful.”

By enabling an efficient new system for organizing team data, governing permissions, and keeping the environment free of clutter, ShareGate continues to make a huge impact in SimCorp’s long-term data efficiency.

“Now, we’re constantly eliminating unnecessary content, and it’s making our environment much cleaner. We hear from our end users that it’s improving their search results.”

The results

15% of sites found to be inactive and removed

With ShareGate’s ongoing help to identify unused sites and teams, SimCorp has reduced sites by 15%, driving more efficient search results for users.

“Around 15% of our sites and content have been deleted or archived because ShareGate showed us they were unused. We have a cleaner environment now, and our data storage is down below our limits.”

By flagging those unused sites and teams automatically, the solution has turned a task that could take up to one month worth of consultant labor into a painless automation.

“We tried scripting our own app to identify unused sites, and I would say it would have been around a month of work from an external consultant. Now, ShareGate just sends us an email every week. It’s a huge time savings.”

With a cleaner environment that’s easy to maintain, SimCorp is moving forward with even more plans to leverage the platform for continual improvements in data efficiency.

“We still use the migration tool from time-to-time when users ask us to move things around within Microsoft 365. We’re also planning to migrate more file shares onto SharePoint Online.”

A new feature that excites Jacob’s team is Cloud copy, the ability to copy Microsoft Teams and channels within or across tenants via web access.

“It will allow us to move chat messages and files from one team to another. That’s sometimes necessary when a team gets too big and needs to be reorganized. It’s something that our users have been asking about, but Microsoft doesn’t offer it themselves. The fact that ShareGate can enable it is really helpful.”

To other IT leaders, Jacob strongly recommends ShareGate for long-term efficiency and permissions security in their Microsoft 365 environment.

“We always make sure new employees know about the tool and that they can use it. Nowadays, a lot of them already know about ShareGate. It’s a great tool that is well-known and has a good reputation on the market.”

“Around 15% of our sites and content have been deleted or archived because ShareGate showed us they were unused. We have a cleaner environment now, and our data storage is down below our limits.”