Note: This case study is illustrative. Client details are anonymised and figures are representative of typical OAS engagements.
The challenge
A logistics and distribution group headquartered in Gauteng operated across several depots and warehouses, with a workforce split between head-office staff, depot administrators, and drivers who depended on email and shared documents from the road.
The group's communications ran on an ageing on-premises email server. It was a maintenance burden and, worse, a single point of failure. An outage took down email for every site at once, stalling dispatch paperwork and customer communication. Mobile access was awkward, collaboration meant emailing attachments back and forth, and the hardware was approaching end of life.
Management also held a common but dangerous assumption: that because email was "in the cloud" once they moved, it would be backed up automatically. In reality, Microsoft's shared-responsibility model means the customer remains responsible for protecting their own data against accidental deletion, malicious action, and retention gaps. The group needed both a modern platform and proper protection for the data on it.
The approach
OAS scoped a migration to Microsoft 365, sized around how the group actually worked — depot administrators who live in email, head-office teams who needed real collaboration, and drivers who needed reliable mobile access.
Migration was planned in waves rather than a single risky cutover. A pilot group at head office validated mail flow, calendars, shared mailboxes, and mobile access before each depot moved in turn. The legacy server remained available as a fallback until the final depot completed, so dispatch operations were never left without email.
With mailboxes, shared documents and Teams collaboration on Microsoft 365, the group gained mobile-friendly access from any depot and the end of single-server outages. OAS configured the tenant with secure baselines — multi-factor authentication for all users and conditional access controls so that access reflected device and location, not just a password.
Critically, OAS addressed the backup gap head-on. Cove Data Protection was deployed to back up Microsoft 365 — Exchange, SharePoint, Teams and OneDrive — to immutable cloud storage with South African data residency options. Cove's TrueDelta technology kept data transfers small enough to be practical across the group's varied depot connectivity, and automated recovery testing confirmed the backups were genuinely restorable.
The outcome
- Multi-depot migration to Microsoft 365 completed in planned waves, with no loss of email service during cutover
- The single-server outage risk removed, replaced by resilient cloud email and collaboration
- Mobile-friendly access for depot administrators and drivers across every site
- Microsoft 365 data protected by immutable, tested backups with SA data residency — closing the assumption gap that Microsoft backs everything up
- Secure tenant baselines, with MFA and conditional access applied across the workforce
OAS continues to manage the environment, handling licensing, security configuration and backup verification under an ongoing agreement — so the group's lean IT function can focus on the business rather than on keeping email alive.