Office 365 is a robust and well used software platform. A common misconception with Office 365 is that Microsoft is looking after your data. There is a shared responsibility model whereby Microsoft look after the platform ensuring its availability, but you are responsible for everything that sits on the platform. This is what drives the need for a good back up plan for Office 365.
In this article we will talk about 5 different reasons why you need an Office 365 backup.
Accidental deletion
If your users accidently delete something. Without a proper backup these items automatically go into the recycle bin and are held for a month and then automatically deleted. These items can be recovered until Microsoft has geo-redundantly deleted the data forever. However the average time to identify an issue is 140 days, well over the 30 days held by Microsoft.
Another area where Microsoft has some gaps is if you were to accidently delete a user. The user will then get deleted across the entire network and all of their associated OneDrive for Business files and their Mailbox will be deleted forever.
Both of these scenarios can create problems for your organisation and with a third-party solution any lost files or items can easily be recovered.
Retention policy gaps
With evolving business needs retention policies can often end up out of date or incorrect over time and result in items being deleted from SharePoint or Teams that shouldn’t.
For example you can set a retention policy of say 6 months on any files within a particular SharePoint site where they are not tagged as commercial in confidence. In this scenario if you fail to tag your documents correctly you can easily delete them without knowing about it.
Microsoft also doesn’t provide a point in time restoration of mailbox items. A third party solution can provide an easy ability to roll back to before an issue occurred for all relevant items.
Internal security threats
When you think about security you often think about hackers and external actors but what about internal threats. Office 365 is designed around user based security and has limited protection against internal users.
Whether an employee is deliberately deleting files to hide things from regulators or a disgruntled employee is terminated but doesn’t have their Office 365 access removed at the right time.
Each of these issues require a robust back up capability to effectively roll back any issues.
External security threats
External security threats is the number one reason why you need a robust Office 365 back up strategy. Microsoft has password attacks over 100 billion times per year. Most ransomware attacks are looking for passwords and focus on Office 365 logins.
Ensuring you are ready to roll back any issues to external threats, mass deletion of data, loss of admin access etc.
Legal, regulatory or compliance requirements
In many industries and for certain document types and transaction or personal data, there is a requirement to hold that data for a certain level of time. If Office 365 is not set up correctly you can easily delete key information that you need to meet your legal, regulatory or compliance requirements.
Ensuring you have the ability to retrieve these files if needed will help you meet you requirements.
Does your Office 365 back up solution help you do all of the above? If not then Bridgeall is a proud Veeam partner and would be happy to help you secure your Office 365 environment.
