Many organizations move to Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) believing that because their data is stored in Microsoft’s cloud, it is automatically protected against every data loss scenario. While Microsoft provides excellent platform availability, security, and data retention capabilities, that does not remove the need for having a backup process in place.
If you or your business relies on Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, or Microsoft Teams, then backing up Office 365 should be heavily considered as part of your data protection strategy.
Microsoft operates under a shared responsibility model, meaning Microsoft is responsible for maintaining the cloud infrastructure, but customers remain responsible for protecting and recovering their own data. Microsoft do provide tools for trying to get back removed data but ultimately, if its unsuccessful, it isn’t their responsibility.
Here are a few reasons why you should have a backup solution in place for your Microsoft 365 data:
1. Accidental Deletion
The most common cause for data loss is simply someone accidentally deleting a file they didn’t mean to. People can accidentally delete emails, files, folders, Teams conversations, or SharePoint content. Some data may be available to recover for a short period of time after deleting but there are often cases where, after say 1 week or 30 days etc, the data is completely gone. Having backups in place can provide much more flexibility to go further back and recover anything that is needed.
2. Protection Against Ransomware and Malware
Cyberattacks continue to grow in sophistication. Malware or ransomware can encrypt, corrupt, or destroy data stored within Microsoft 365 services. Being able to access a clean copy of your data is a very valuable resource.
3. Compliance and Legal Requirements
Many industries must retain records for regulatory, audit, or legal reasons. When information is requested during an investigation or compliance audit, organizations need to be able to access historic data records which otherwise may have been deleted.
What Should a Microsoft 365 Backup Solution Include?
A modern Microsoft 365 backup solution should provide:
- Backup for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, and Teams.
- Granular recovery of emails, files, folders, and conversations.
- Fast search and restore capabilities.
- Protection against ransomware and accidental deletion.
- Long-term retention options.
- Independent storage outside the production environment.
What solutions could I use?
There are various ways to have a backup of your 365 data.
The simplest but least robust way of doing it is to do a manual copy paste of your important documents, pictures etc and store them in a secure area. This, however, requires a lot more maintenance to have up-to-date backups as well as not including copies of Teams conversations and complicates having backups of emails. But it is better than nothing.
The other ways are to use third party programs such as Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, Acronis and Dropsuite. These services allow individuals and organisations to backup a wide variety of 365 areas such as emails, personal OneDrive, SharePoint, Users etc and allows regular daily or even hourly backups, long storage retention (years) and easy recovery back to the original location data was stored in.
Hopefully this article helps but if you want some more information, the following links should help:
https://www.veeam.com/blog/momentum-office-365-backup.html
https://www.veeam.com/blog/office365-shared-responsibility-model.html
https://heliocentrix.co.uk/blog/insights/why-you-need-a-m365-backup-and-how-dropsuite-can-help/
