afi.ai vs. Spanning Backup

Great for archiving of deleted SharePoint online sites and off-boarded Microsoft 365 users; unlimited number of on-demand backup runs that can be triggered in the application by system administrators.

The only issue we have is when we remove the user from the integrated AD group we need to manually go back and remove the licensing, but there is the option to have archived accounts as well for temporary holds in case we want to disable the account in 365/AD, but need to hold on to the backups for a little longer.

Incentivized

• Archiving of deleted Microsoft 365 users.
• Backup of SharePoint lists and OneNote books.
• Fast offline export of a mailbox and SharePoint items.

• Perpetual email and file backups.
• No limits on backup volume, capacity or file types.
• Excellent Management Console for Administrative users.
• End-user access available for self-management.
• Easy to enable and disable various accounts for backup.
• Easy to restore emails and files from one account to another.

Incentivized

• It would be handy to have SharePoint file versions comparisons in the UI
• Email alerts on settings changes would be good to have too.

• Thus far, Spanning has completely fulfilled all of our backup needs, and we are completely satisfied.
• While we haven't needed technical support yet, we were told that this is conducted via email rather than via phone.

We will continue to renew the service for as long as we continue to use MS 365, unless Microsoft will release native Office 365 backup that provides all necessary features, including multi-geo admin roles, long-term affordable archiving storage tier, auto-conversion of email formats (MBOX, EML etc), point-in-time preview of previous file versions.

The UI is very intuitive and requires almost zero training to use. Our end users were able to use it with after just reading a simple one-pager.

It was hands down, one of the easiest solutions to implement overall and has some of the best features also compared to other similar products from many SaaS backup companies. We also integrated the Dark Web monitoring too and it has helped us secure accounts we didn't know had issues, so has improved our security posture too.

Incentivized

We needed to contact them three times over the course of two years, and it was very good. Very fast response, and the people are super technical and to the point.

I would like a retention option on the data, but since this feature does not currently exist, I give it a 9. Everything has met our standards and needs and we are now freed up from the manual efforts it was taking for backing up Salesforce using the out-of-the-box features of Salesforce.

Incentivized

afi is next generation system, with our previous vendor we had to wait for a long time to access data, sometimes up to 24h.The reason for that was our scale according to the support team. ( 50TB +) With afi it takes a few seconds. The UI is super simple and easy to use, no training required for end-users to work with the system. afi support is super responsive and very helpful.

Spanning Backup for G Suite backs up Google Drive files and Unitrends is used for more VM infrastructure.

Incentivized

• It's hard to assess ROI here, however we were able to recover very important documents and full user accounts for executive team during the audit. It helped in a big way.
• Self-Service is a life saver for IT helpdesk team, saved a lot of human hours.

• No longer dedicating a resource to manual efforts.
• Less work and money if disaster recovery is needed compared to Salesforce.

Incentivized