Protect your Microsoft 365 Data: 7 Compelling Reasons to Invest in a Backup Solution

As more and more businesses move to the cloud, Microsoft 365 has become a popular choice for companies looking for a flexible and scalable solution for their IT needs. Microsoft has done an excellent job of creating reliable infrastructure and providing a great user experience.  But many businesses assume that Microsoft takes care of everything, including backing up their data. Unfortunately, this is not the case.

Whose responsibility is it to protect data?

While Microsoft provides some level of protection for your data, they are not responsible for backing up your data. This means that the responsibility for protecting your data lies with you, and without a backup solution, you could be at risk of data loss.  You need to take steps to backup the data in Microsoft Exchange, Sharepoint, OneDrive, and Teams.  One of the most common misconceptions about Microsoft 365 is that it includes a backup solution. While Microsoft 365 does offer some level of redundancy to protect against hardware and infrastructure failures, this is not the same as a backup solution. Backup solutions provide a historical copy of your data that you can access and control, which is essential in case of accidental deletion, malware or virus attacks, retention policy gaps, internal and external security threats, legal and compliance requirements, and managing hybrid email deployments and migrations to Microsoft 365.

Here are 7 reasons why it’s important to back up your Microsoft 365 data:

  1. Accidental Deletion: If you delete a user it is replicated across the network, and their OneDrive for Business account and mailbox are deleted as well. “Soft” deletes in Microsoft 365 can sometimes be recovered but “hard” deletes will require a proper backup solution.
  2. Retention Policy Gaps and Confusion: Microsoft 365 has limited backup and retention policies that can’t account for all scenarios.  Point-in-time restorations are another limitation that require a backup strategy outside of Microsoft 365. 
  3. Internal Security Threats: Businesses can and do experience threats from inside the organization. Their own employees can, both intentionally and unintentionally delete critical information or tamper with sensitive files.
  4. External Security Threats: We all know the damage malware and viruses can do to an organization. A proper backup solution helps ensure that in the event of a security incident, you have a protected copy of your data and can recover it.
  5. Legal and Compliance Requirements: While Microsoft has built-in a couple of safety nets (litigation and retention), they are not robust and may not be enough for you to meet your compliance requirements or produce documents required for legal proceedings.
  6. Managing Hybrid Email Deployments and Migrations to Microsoft 365: A good Microsoft 365 backup solution should be able to handle hybrid email deployments and treat exchange data the same regardless of location. 
  7. Teams Data Structure: Companies are increasingly using Teams to manage projects and collaborate.  The amount of data, settings, configurations, and memberships is huge.  Being able to recovery data all aspects of this requires the proper backup strategy.

The risks of not having a backup solution for your Microsoft 365 data are too high to ignore. Don’t assume that Microsoft takes care of everything; you need to ensure that you have complete access and control over your Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Teams data. By investing in a backup solution, you can avoid the unnecessary risks of data loss.

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