While Microsoft Office 365 is famed for its suite of collaborative and dynamic workspaces for consumers and businesses, Microsoft’s backup policies can’t guarantee a fast and complete restoration of lost data. The restore process can be complicated, lengthy, and depend on the retention policies for each application.
Protection and data loss are top concerns for businesses migrating to the cloud and even with the cutting-edge security measures, privacy and compliance that supports the Microsoft Office 365 cloud platform. Businesses should take an additional step and perform secure backups of SaaS data, so that in the event of a data loss, all applications and data can be quickly restored.
Office 365 retention and backup policies can only protect you from data loss in certain limited scenarios, and this policy can’t compare to leading 3rd party backup solutions.
MBC can help alleviate Office 365 data loss worries and help you understand where the responsibilities of Microsoft end in regard to backup and recovery and where those of your business begins. Our comprehensive backup solutions will enable the simple backup and restore of all your Office 365 data plus your on-premise Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint Organizations, including Microsoft OneDrive for Business.
When you stop and think about it, Office 365 is an essential work tool for most organizations. Often, it is the centre of productivity, which makes ensuring data protection essential. Without a proper backup strategy for Office 365, your business could be exposed to many risks if faced with a data loss. As we will highlight below, Microsoft’s shared responsibility is limited to infrastructure with Office 365, making the ultimate responsibility of ensuring that your data is protected with your business.
OnePoint and SharePoint applications are what power much of Office 365’s collaboration capabilities. However, both of these apps use a primary and secondary recycle bin that only has 93-day retention periods, and if manually purged, are not retrievable. While OneDrive recently released a feature that allows users to roll back files to any point of time within the past 30 days, it has some flaws. Unfortunately, this means that a user would have to roll back all data to the date they want to restore and cannot just select certain files or folders. Also, if any of the data was manually deleted, it can’t still be restored.
Exchange Online has different retention policies. Deleted emails are sent to the deleted items folder and once purged or manually deleted from this folder will go to a ‘recoverable items folder’ and have a 14-day retention period.
Simply put, the policies from Microsoft do not enable consumers to easily backup and restore. Brien Posey, Microsoft MVP stated, “The sad truth is that you might not have as many options for restoring your data as you might think. As such, it is critically important to understand your options for disaster recovery in an Office 365 environment.”
By partnering with MBC, you can be confident that your Office 365 data is fully protected in the cloud and you won’t risk a SaaS data loss from an unexpected purge, human error, cyberattack, or malicious insiders. To learn more about how we can support your business with complete backup and restore solutions, get a free assessment today.
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