Microsoft Office 365 is the most popular messaging and collaboration platform on the market today. Nearly 80% of IT decision makers surveyed by, technology research company, Gartner recently said they were currently using or planning to use Office 365 software and services.
The Office 365 platform is a powerful tool that allows IT managers to leverage Exchange and Sharepoint Online as an efficient cloud-based email and collaboration platform. Microsoft takes care of quite a bit for companies—it manages their Office 365 infrastructure and maintains uptime for their users. However, it does not back up their data. The irony here is that seasoned IT managers get lulled into a false sense of security that, just because the platform is resilient, it is going to protect them from malicious users or accidental disasters that have nothing to do with the data centre.
So can we all agree that Microsoft Office 365 does not backup their data?
The backup and recoverability that Microsoft provides and what users assume that they are getting are often very different. Microsoft Office 365 offers geo redundancy, which protects user’s availability, not their data. It also offers a level of version roll-back which can mitigate SOME of the accidental issues associated with deletion – But not all.
“Backing up your data from a cloud service is something that takes most people a while to wrap their heads around.” Said Gadget Access’s, Andrew Curtis. “While most cloud services offer an amazing level of redundancy and protection against site or hardware failure, these won’t protect users from user error and data loss.”
Accidental or malicious deletion, retention policy gaps & confusion, internal & external security threats, and legal compliance requirements all cause significant and irreversible data loss on an Office 365 platform.
These threats are common occurrences— meaning that Office 365 backup should be a critical part of every company’s disaster recovery plan.
As far back as October 2016, Veeam Software released a backup solution for Office 365 that allows companies to take control of their organization’s Office 365 data. It helps companies reduce the time and effort needed to find and restore email data, protects against data loss scenarios that are not covered by Microsoft, and facilitates the migration of email data between Office 365 and on-premises Exchange.
“Veeam has created one of the best Office 365 backup solutions out there at the moment.” Curtis said. “It is a simple safety net that I would recommend to any company that is looking to ensure that their Office 365 data is always safe and protected.”