Microsoft Office 365 is a subscription-based service which gives you access to a suite of Microsoft applications as well as other productivity services such as email, file-sharing, online collaboration and unified communications.
As these services are cloud-based, Office 365 gives your users the ability to work anywhere, anytime and on any device. In addition, the service is fully managed and hosted by Microsoft which means the management, maintenance and security of these services is their responsibility.
Data on Office 365 is your responsibility
Even though the functionality, availability and scalability are Microsoft’s responsibility, Office 365 users cannot abdicate their responsibility when it comes to protecting their data.
Microsoft does offer a few paid options which allow you to archive data on their platform such as Exchange Online Protection, document versioning on SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business and the ability to retain deleted items for a set period of time.
These services however, are not backup solutions and organisations relying solely on these to protect their data are putting their business at risk.
Office 365 data protection solutions are not backup solutions
The ability to restore data in the event of a data loss incident be it an accidental deletion, data corruption incident or even a malware attack involving ransomware, is a critical requirement for businesses operating in today’s technology dependent world.
Office 365 does not offer true backup in that there is no service offering a long-term independent copy of your data that can be restored if the original data source is compromised in any way. Even though there is a certain level of risk mitigation built into the data protection services Microsoft Office 365 does offer, they are not backup solutions in that data is not stored for a long period of time and any form of data loss or corruption can put your business at risk.
Your data on Office 365 is not protected
When it comes to identifying possible threats to data being stored on Microsoft’s Office 365 platform, Veeam has identified six scenarios where the current Office 365 data protection options will fail to adequately protect your data.
These include the accidental deletion of a user which will be replicated across your Office 365 environment, and misconfigured retention policy settings which may create inconsistencies in what you believe is being protected and what is actually being retained. In addition, the risks created by both internal and external security threats, such as hacking and ransomware, are also not mitigated by the existing Office 365 data archiving solutions.
Furthermore, the Office 365 data protection options do not cater for hybrid environments where you may have some data stored on-premise, and some in the cloud. Finally, archiving solutions do not meet data compliance requirements which dictate that certain types of data need to be stored and retain their integrity at certain points in time, and that a separation of duties exist between the production and data protection environments.
To secure your data on Office 365 as well as mitigate the risks described above, it is imperative that you deploy a legitimate backup solution which gives you the ability to successfully protect and restore your data should the need arise.
The backup solution you deploy should meet certain criteria expected of an enterprise grade service. These include, the ability to protect data which is stored in your Office 365 environment, the capability to rapidly restore individual Office 365 items, and of course the solution must meet the necessary legal and compliance conditions your business needs to adhere to.
Probax Backup for Office 365 can protect your Office 365 Data
The backup offering from Probax meets and exceeds the requirements needed of a backup service for Office 365. Powered by Veeam, Probax’s Backup for Office 365 solution provides a pragmatic user interface for complete control and protection of Office 365., With six point in time backups per day and the capability to perform additional backups as needed, you can rest assured that all your data is truly protected and restorable at any time.
A single, fixed monthly cost per Exchange Online mailbox provides unlimited storage and archive retention in AWS storage in Australia or the US.
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