Microsoft Office 365 (sometimes referred to as O365) is a popular SaaS (solution-as-a-service) offering for today’s businesses. With Office 365, end users and organizations get a robust suite of productivity tools, which include Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, and Microsoft Teams among others.  As opposed to conventional licensing and usage models for these applications, Microsoft Office 365 is hosted in the cloud, making it available anytime, anywhere – without the hassle of installing or maintaining these services.

And while Microsoft manages the physical infrastructure and network elements of Office 365, customers must be aware of their own responsibilities. Specifically, their role in protecting their data living with the suite of Office 365 solutions.

Like many SaaS providers, Microsoft follows a shared responsibility model for Office 365. This means, as a hosted service, Microsoft owns the application. They take responsibility and ownership of maintaining the underlying architecture, which includes security, reliability, and accessibility of Office 365 applications (and its functions). In doing so, Microsoft delivers a highly robust and capable SaaS platform that meets the productivity needs of many organizations. The customer, however, is responsible for their own data residing in Office 365 – making Office 365 Backup and recovery a critical component in safeguarding business data. Office 365 backup is proven to both safeguard emails, messages, files, etc… living in Office 365 production environments, but also deleted customer data that is no longer accessible to users.

For this reason, Microsoft recommends third-party, dedicated protection, for long-term extended coverage of Office 365 data, found in Office 365 backup solutions.

Why dedicated protection with Office 365 backup?

Some believe replication controls Microsoft offers natively provides the same-level of control and coverage as dedicated Office 365 backup and recovery. However, these native controls are not built for extended, long term data retention. Here is how dedicated, third-party solutions comprehensively protect data, while helping meet recovery SLAs:

Data Loss

Data loss comes in many shapes and sizes, and no one is immune. With dedicated protection, customers get immutable, virtual air-gapped coverage with robust recovery controls – so they can always recover from loss or attack, including:

Ransomware

Ransomware is a type of malware attack that penetrates systems and rapidly encrypts data. For businesses, ransomware can impact valuable consumer, operational, financial, and sensitive information, rendering it useless – severely disrupting (and potentially halting) business operations. And as ransomware threats, and the price tags associated with them surge, Office 365 backup provides a safety value to protect and rapidly (and fully) restore critical Office 365 data from attack.

Deletion

User error happens. Whether mistakenly removing a user, errantly altering a site or file, or deleting an important email – dedicated Office 365 backup goes beyond Microsoft retention limits. However, with native controls, once data is hard deleted from the production environment, it can no longer be recovered. With unlimited storage and unlimited retention offered via dedicated Office 365 backup and recovery solutions, businesses can always restore active or deleted Office 365 data.

To know more about Office 365 Migration Pricing or Exchange 2013 Hybrid Migration to Office 365 visit O365CloudExperts.