Why You Need a Backup Solution for your Office 365 Subscription?

Microsoft Office 365 has transformed business use of the cloud.  Gartner recently reported that 1 in 5 corporate employees use an Office 365 cloud service, and that Office 365 is now the most widely used cloud service by user count.

The incredible growth in the adoption of Microsoft Office 365 can be attributed to the fact that it is simply easier and more efficient to use than on-premise solutions of old Microsoft Office solutions.  The licensing is an easy-to-consume subscription model that can be modified on-the-fly, and the products can be deployed to multiple platforms or simply used in the cloud. Customers can access their Office applications and sync and share documents anywhere, even if they’re offline, and there’s no need for a VPN connection to an on-premises file server.  

However, a widely held misconception is that the Microsoft service even takes care of your email and data backups. It’s true that Microsoft has native retention and basic recovery capabilities but even Microsoft urges caution and recommends full backups. Their service level agreements clearly state that retention length is limited and that recovery capabilities are not guaranteed. 

The retention and backup of your data remains your responsibility.

The main reasons why you need a backup solution for your Office 365 subscription

1. Approximately 70% of data loss is due to accidental or malicious deletion of data by end-users.  If your discovery of the loss takes longer than the configured retention policy, the data is gone.  Microsoft service level agreements do not protect customers against this.
2. If your Office 365 administrator account is compromised, your backups could be lost as well.
   
3. Will your Microsoft data retention capabilities be able to restore files and accounts in the configuration you need?  Even if the data is backed-up as needed, the restore process could be more difficult than you want.
4. Are you legally required to comply with specific retention and potential-litigation policies?  Will the native tools included with your Microsoft Office 365 subscription provide this capability for you?
5. Users can accidentally corrupt their data with malware, especially ransomware.  Recovery from this scenario can be difficult and time-consuming using built-in capabilities. Versioning in OneDrive and SharePoint can help, but this counts against storage allocation and may result in additional storage costs.

Conclusion

Your data is one of your most important assets. It is your responsibility to ensure that it is accessible and protected. The data in your Microsoft Office 365 subscription is no different. We recommend using the 3-2-1 rule: at least three copies of data, in two different formats, with one copy stored offline or in the cloud remains one of the best ways to protect your data.

Reach out to one of our MicroAge locations to know how to properly implement a backup solution for your Office 365 subscription.