Microsoft does not guarantee complete and fast restores of deleted or corrupted Office 365 data.

Protecting Microsoft Office 365 and other SaaS applications data is critical to the productivity of your organization.  Apps like Microsoft Office 365 make sense in today’s mobile world.  There are many great benefits including the ease of access to documents from any device and improved collaboration are obvious. However, many organizations believe that moving to Office 365 means backup is no longer necessary. 

Take a look at Microsoft’s data protection VS your responsibilities.

Microsoft provides:

• Protection against loss of service due to hardware failure or natural disaster
• Short-term protection against user and admin error (Recycle Bin, soft delete)

Your responsibilities:

• Accidental deletion
• Hackers, ransomware, and other malware
• Malicious insiders
• Departing employees

That’s why Microsoft recommends third-party backup in the Service Availability section of its Services Agreement. See below:

“We strive to keep the Services up and running; however, all online services suffer occasional disruptions and outages, and Microsoft is not liable for any disruption or loss you may suffer as a result. In the event of an outage, you may not be able to retrieve Your Content or Data that you’ve stored. We recommend that you regularly backup Your Content and Data that you store on the Services or store using Third-Party Apps and Services.”

It is clearly spelled out in Microsoft’s Service Agreement that they do not guarantee that your data will be backed-up and recovered for you.    

In addition to this information, we’ve included 5 reasons why you need to backup your O365 data:

Your data is in the cloud, but where?

Office 365 variety of applications and data structures are stored in the cloud. But where? Where exactly is your data? And if you did have to retrieve it, how would you find it? Many people don’t realize that their data (Outlook emails, OneDrive documents, SharePoint files, Team conversations, etc.) are separate, and sometimes stored separately. So the only way to back it up, and restore all of it, is with a system designed to find it all, store it all, and restore it all. This is not an easy task, and sometimes nearly impossible to do with the native Office 365 backup tools.

Outlook doesn’t backup emails older than 30 days.

YIKES, did you know that?  Outlook does not backup emails older than 30 days that have been deleted from the bin. Couple that with limited email storage and what you have is end-users who are sometimes forced to delete old emails. The danger in a limited file storage policy is by end-users deleting their old emails to save space, they are potentially destroying records that may be required for legal or regulatory compliance, should your firm ever be audited.

Regulated Industries have stricter backup regulations.

If your firm is in a regulated industry like Finance, Healthcare or Legal, you may have regulations and requirements for access to data that goes well beyond typical backup methods. HIPPA, GDPR, and other regulations often require firms to keep complete and accurate records of email, attachments, files and related information for many years. Because Office 365 backup is a limited time backup, compliance with these regulations is not guaranteed with the out-of-the-box tools that come with Office 365. There are optional backup/archiving available for purchase with Office 365, but this is at a greater cost and with a more difficult user experience versus other Third-Party Backup Solutions.

Ransomware Hackers are out there.

Data loss is possible in this new world of hackers and data hostage viruses. Many firms have already faced ransomware attacks that literally took down their business. The only way to truly protect your business from a ransomware attack is by having a full and complete backup and archive of all your data. Anything less, and your business is in danger of being severely impacted by the loss of data. Office 365 does not keep full and complete backups and archives of all your data going back months and years. Only a backup and archive tool specifically made for this kind of process can handle that task easily and quickly.

You can’t afford to be without your data.

Keeping full and accurate records of your data is a must for your business continuity. Ensuring access to that data is a key function of a full and complete data backup and archiving policy. Think of backup and archiving as an insurance policy against the risk to your business of data loss. The out-of-the-box tools that come with Office 365 should not be your only tool to ensure your business has full and complete records in the event a data loss happens.

At navitend we provide our customers third-party solutions that are useful for protecting application data whereas Microsoft provides disaster recovery functionality for the infrastructure. There could be a loss of data if Microsoft needs to perform a rollback of a tenant. In that case, the responsibility would be on the customer to have a reliable way to recover their lost data. This is the gap that 3rd party solutions fill.  If you have any questions feel free to call our office at 973-448-0070 ext 312 and ask for Patrice.