Office 365, who manages your backup?
The BIG misconception.

As businesses adopt SaaS applications and shift resources to the cloud, Microsoft Office 365 is quickly becoming standard. Cloud-based software can potentially help save you from the challenges of maintaining application servers, but it can also lead to a false sense of security if you think migrating to Office 365 will manage all of the data retention and recovery requirements of your business.

Do you have control of your Office 365 data?
Does anyone in your business have access to all or any of the necessary components? Often, the knee-jerk response is, “Of course I do,” or “Microsoft takes care of everything.” But if you actually consider it, are you certain?

Microsoft takes care of a fair bit and provides its customers with an excellent service. Microsoft’s main focus is on running the Office 365 infrastructure and maintaining uptime to your users. Ultimately, you must ensure you have access to, and command over, your Exchange Online, SharePoint and OneDrive for Business data.

They are empowering YOU and YOUR business with the responsibility for YOUR data.

The common misconception is that Microsoft manages your 365 data backups on your behalf, and if this duty is left unattended, there could be detrimental consequences without a change in mindset.

The BIG office 365 misconception.

“With Office 365, it’s your data. You own it. You control it.”

— The Office 365 Trust Centre

The confusion lies between the assumed responsibility of Microsoft and the real responsibility of the customer for maintaining and preserving their Office 365 data over the short and long term. Microsoft’s backup and recoverability, and what consumers think they are receiving, is often different. In other words, apart from the usual safeguards that MS Office 365 has in place, you may need to re-evaluate the data’s level of control and how much exposure you really have.

Microsoft Office 365, which is often mistaken for backup, provides geo-redundancy. Backup happens when a previous copy of the data is made and then preserved elsewhere. Even more critical, however, is that you have full access and control over that backup. So, for example, if data is lost, accidentally deleted, or maliciously targeted — you can recover data fast. Geo redundancy, on the other hand, protects against site or hardware failure, so if an infrastructure collapse or outage happens the users will remain productive and will often be unaware of these underlying problems.

What does this mean.

Okay, it’s your data — you manage it with Office 365, very clearly, and ultimately it’s your responsibility to protect it. This means you need some kind of third-party provider that can back up and recover all your Office 365 data in case the worst happens. There are a variety of tools and methods that can do this, but at Kalamazoo IT, due to its flexibility and efficiency, we use SolarWinds cloud backup services.

Users can often unwittingly (or purposely) delete important emails, or OneDrive or SharePoint files. If this happens, Online Backup offers the ability to quickly search for and recover what you need.

Here we’re talking about Ransomware and Malware protection. Sure, it’s true that Microsoft already has malware protection in place, but sadly it doesn’t guarantee a user won’t corrupt their data if it gets infected by a ransomware or malware attack You could call on the built-in data protection measures in Office 365 at this stage, but this could indeed be very painful as well as time-consuming, and essentially there is no guarantee of recovery using the basic tools.

If employees leave and you don’t want to continue paying a subscription fee simply to store their email and shared documents, Online Backup for Office 365 offers an additional way to retain and access this data.

If you are responsible for an organisation that falls under regulations with data-retention requirements, Online Backup is designed to help you retain and archive critical data.

Kalamazoo Managed IT Support helps you strike the right balance between automation and control. You can manually select which accounts and mailboxes you want to protect, or automatically add newly created Office 365 accounts to the backup schedule.

Exchange mailboxes are automatically backed up every four hours, and OneDrive and SharePoint accounts every six hours, giving you multiple restore points every day. Choose the one you want, and recover fast.

Go ahead and look closer. There are holes in your defence that you may not have been aware of previously.

With Microsoft Office 365, you’ve already made a smart business decision, now find a cloud backup solution that gives you both full access and complete control of your Office 365 data, avoid unnecessary data loss risks.

Reduce Risk With Online Backup Services
for Microsoft Office 365.

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