Backup your Office 365 environment!

In the past two years, Over 50 percent of businesses experienced an unforeseen interruption, and the vast majority (81%) of these interruptions caused the business to be closed for one or more days.

Did you know that 80 percent of businesses suffering a major disaster go out of business in three years, while 40 percent of businesses that experience a critical IT failure go out of business within one year. In the case of suffering a fire, 44 percent of enterprises fail to reopen and 33 percent of these failed to survive beyond 3 years…

It’s a common mistake to think that Microsoft takes core of backups for your Office 365 environment. Yes, they do make backups, every 12 hours with a retention of 14 days. However, this is only designed for emergency purposes, and if you need it your self, they will charge you for that.

But then you might think that there is a recycle bin and versioning, yes, but these are limited as well. For email the retention is just 30 days, and for SharePoint it is 90 days. This can extended with the E3 and E5 subscriptions. But is this a real backup? and can this guarantee save data retrieval in case of a disaster? the answer is NO!

By hosting your email and data in Office 365 it doesn’t supersede you from your responsibility to maintain a backup of your data. In fact, ownership of your data I the cloud is your obligation, not Microsofts. Although they will do whatever they can to protect your data, and this includes securing your data with EM+S suites as well.

So here are some reasons to backup your Office 365 environment:

• Legal and compliance requirements: There might be requirements to save your data longer than the retention policies provided by Microsoft including a “offsite” backup, using an external backup these can be extended to meet the stated requirements
• Accidental deletion: If data gets deleted, and cleaned data might be permanently lost and irretrievable. With offsite backups you can restore either directly back to Office 365, or other systems.
• Internal security threats: Although this might seem illogical, this is one off the main threats. This happens more often than you might thing. By having a good backup and recovery strategy mitigates the risk of critical data being lost or destroyed.
• External security threats: Malware and viruses have done serious damage to organisations around the globe. Backups can easily be restored with backups.
• Low and guaranteed RTO: Whit a offsite backup a quick recovery is guaranteed, where you would be depending on the Microsoft support if you need to get a restore quickly…
• Monitoring and reporting: In Office 365 there is none. You want to know if your data is safe or not? isn’t it?
• Without data: You can’t afford to be without data, your business will stop to work. How long can you survive without?

There are plenty more reasons to backup your Office 365 environment. But clearly enough you need a backup. There are multiple ways to achieve it. Take it seriously, and make sure you are safe!