The following five reasons may have you convinced that if you want to be compliant and be able to quickly restore your information, native O365 functionality is not enough.
1. Disruptions and outages of Microsoft services may lead to downtime and data loss
Against popular belief, power outages and service disruptions due to hardware or software failure aren’t that unusual for cloud giants like Microsoft. For example, the Microsoft outages in September and October 2020 heavily affected many European regions by causing massive downtime for companies.
If something happens from Microsoft’s side, you won’t be able to reach your data and continue working unless you have a backup
2. Office 365 account deletion leads to the deletion of all the data on that account
Deleting O365 accounts is quite a standard procedure in companies. There are many instances when an O365 account can be deleted:
To save money on licenses when an employee leaves
To migrate data to another account or data management suite
As the result of license services ending
As a result of negligent accidental account deletion
As a result of intentional (malicious) account deletion
Regardless of the reasons behind the account deletion, the outcome for you will stay the same: the account data will be erased forever.
Microsoft addresses this possibility in their services agreement and recommends their users to regularly back up their data if they want to access it after the account deletion.
3. Native Office 365 backup & recovery tools’ capabilities are limited
Does Microsoft backup Office 365 data? Well, yes and no.
Office 365 allows you to recover deleted items. However, the native Office 365 recovery tools are quite limited. The basic recovery from Deleted Items helps with recently accidentally deleted emails, but what about other cases? Long-deleted or purged files, corrupted mailboxes, items lost due to cyber-attacks or incorrect migrations – these are just a few things Microsoft will not help you to restore. Here are the limitations of the native recovery:
Recovery is time-limited. Office 365 retention time is quite limited. By default, the items are kept around for up to 30 days (14 days by default). Moreover, the purged items will be lost. However, you might need to restore your long-deleted files and emails. For example, for compliance or reporting purposes. That’s why you’ll need an Office 365 Email Backup
No point-in-time recovery. Let’s say your mailbox has got corrupted, and the version history is turned off. Your data becomes lost forever as there is no way to choose the “clean” version and restore it. This is possible only if you backup your Office 365 mailbox.
Recovery is overcomplicated. Unlike professional backup software, O365 is not a one-click solution. For example, Office 365 recovery via In-Place eDiscovery & Hold has many conditions and steps that are too time-consuming and still not always helpful.
4. Permanent data deletions in Office 365 are irreversible without a backup
There are two ways data can be deleted in Office 365: temporarily (soft-deleted) and permanently (hard-deleted). In the first case, your information is recoverable without backup; in the second case, it isn’t.
Data becomes permanently deleted (or hard-deleted) without hope for restoration in the following cases:
1. When it has been temporarily deleted (or soft-deleted) for longer than 30 days without being restored;
2. When the user account that is associated with this data has been hard-deleted;
3. When someone manually removes the data from the Recoverable Items folder.
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