Why Back Up Office 365? Doesn’t Microsoft do that?

Every business grapples with the challenges of moving to the cloud. It isn’t a matter of IF, but  WHEN and HOW.

For tens of thousands of organizations, the WHEN is Today and the HOW is with Ensure VC2.

We partnered with Veeam to provide our customers a solid way to back up files, including Microsoft 365. When we began rolling this product out a little over a year ago, even we didn’t imagine the size of the response in such a short amount of time.

While you are reading this, you may be thinking “Doesn’t Microsoft take care of Office 365 backup?”

It’s important to remember that SaaS platform providers, like Microsoft Office 365, take on the responsibility of application uptime and the underlying infrastructure. But it is the customer’s responsibility to manage and protect their vital business data.

At mPowered IT, we’ve identified 6 reasons why backing up Office 365 is critical:

1. Accidental deletion: If you delete a user, whether you meant to or not, that deletion is replicated across the network. A backup can restore that user, either to on-premises Exchange or Office 365.
2. Retention policy gaps and confusion: Office 365 retention policies are hard to keep up with, let alone manage. A backup provides longer, more accessible retention all protected and stored in one place for easy recovery.
3. Internal security threats: Many businesses are experiencing threats from the inside, and they are happening more often than you think. Having a high-grade recovery solution mitigates the risk of critical data being lost or destroyed.
4. External security threats: Malware and viruses have done serious damage to organizations globally in just the past year alone. A backup can easily restore mailboxes to an instance before the attack.
5. Legal and compliance requirements: Ensure you can retrieve mailbox data during legal action and to meet any regulatory compliance needs.
6. Managing hybrid email deployments and migrations to Office 365: Whether you are migrating to Office 365 or have a blend of on-premises Exchange and Office 365 users, the exchange data should be managed and protected the same way, making the source location irrelevant.

The promise we have made is we will help our customers protect any app, any data, across any cloud, and this latest news moves us closer to fulfilling that promise. I’d like to share what Thierry Schaal, Cloud Solution Manager at Adista had to say. Adista is a Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) partner:

“As more workloads move to the cloud, customers need to understand that SaaS applications typically don’t have built-in data protection. SaaS usage has uncovered unique internal and external security threats, as well as all-to-common data deletion scenarios and retention policy gaps. We see a rapidly growing opportunity to provide much-needed data protection services for a wide range of infrastructures and applications – which is why we are excited about Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365.”

For more information on Microsoft 365 backups or any other network security question call mPowered IT at 678-389-6200, email us, or contact us online.