September 26, 2024

Why You Need to Back Up Office 365

When it comes to Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity, the terms availability and recoverability are often used to describe data protection solutions. One ensures your business can continue operating during an unplanned incident that impacts critical services. The other assesses your ability to recover data lost during such events. Both are crucial in today's digital world, where uninterrupted uptime is essential to meet the demands of users and customers.

The technologies that enable these vital business protection services vary greatly and understanding the difference is vital to protecting your data on Office 365.

Protecting Data is a Shared Responsibility

Microsoft delivers Office 365 using the cloud service model of Software as a Service (SaaS). With SaaS, the service provider is responsible for managing and maintaining everything from the underlying infrastructure to the application itself.

However, the end-user still has a significant role to play. SaaS operates on a multi-tenant architecture, where multiple independent subscribers use the same infrastructure to access the service. Users are responsible for providing and managing access, as well as protecting the data they store on the service.

Availability

Microsoft is responsible for ensuring the availability of the online services they market under the Office 365 brand. Whether it be email via Exchange Online, portals and collaboration via SharePoint Online, or Messaging via Skype for Business, Microsoft has implemented multiple redundant technologies ensuring their services remain connected and available.

By replicating their services across multiple servers and across various data centres in the same region, they maintain high-availability.

This redundant architecture approach ensures that any single component failure, whether it be something as insignificant as a single hard drive or something as large as an entire data centre, does not affect a subscriber’s ability to access and consume the service.

Recoverability

Microsoft does not back up your data on Office 365. Although they offer some data retention services, there is no offline, independent copy of the information you store on the platform. Office 365's data retention policies can recover deleted data, but these policies are complex. This complexity can lead to gaps in retention, giving you a false sense of security about your data protection.

Protecting Your Data is Your Responsibility

While Microsoft takes care of availability by implementing various technologies that ensure their service remains accessible and available. However, the recoverability features offered by Office 365 are not enough to protect your data from every possible threat.

Since Microsoft does not offer point-in-time restores or maintain an offline, independent copy of your data, the critical information you store on Office 365 is at risk. To safeguard your data, you need to deploy a third-party solution such as an Managed Service Provider (MSP) and Backup Software.

An MSP that specialises in Business IT Support can ensure comprehensive data protection and recovery strategies, provide expert management of retention policies, and maintain an independent backup of your data. This reduces the risk of data loss and ensures your business continuity, allowing you to focus on your core operations without worrying about potential data gaps.

Ready to protect your Office 365 data? Schedule a free consultation with our experts today to explore the best backup solutions for your business.

Office 365 Backup & Archive from Evolve Equipment Management

Office 365 Backup & Archive is a cloud-to-cloud backup as a service (BaaS) which provides a simple, automated and secure backup solution for Microsoft Office 365. With Evolve Equipment Management Office 365 Backup & Archive, organisations can:

Enhance protection of Office 365 data from accidental deletion, threats and retention policy gaps;
Quickly restore individual Office 365 items and files with industry-leading recovery flexibility; and
Meet legal, compliance, and data sovereignty requirements with efficient eDiscovery of Office 365 backup archives and your choice of AWS storage location.

Offered on a monthly subscription with the option to backup