Is it necessary to backup Microsoft 365?

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Microsoft and its cloud services are now present in most business environments. It is a product capable of improving various work aspects, in particular, collaboration and internal and external communication of the organization.

It is therefore necessary to know what the Microsoft 365 backup process included in the package consists of, in order to act to best safeguard and protect company and customer data.

The Microsoft 365 shared responsibility concept

As also reported by the Microsoft Office 365 Trust Center, the data protection and backup policy offered is limited.

Its main commitment is to ensure the availability of the service itself, keeping the infrastructure active and switched on uninterruptedly and consequently the productivity of its customers.

This includes the physical security of its data centers and identity and access protection based on user/administrator role.

Therefore, we are talking about shared responsibility precisely because as regards the protection and saving of the company data itself, which is located in the Microsoft 365 cloud, the burden falls on the user company.

This is why you should choose to make an external Microsoft 365 backup

You should absolutely not think that data saved in the cloud cannot incur losses. In fact, they are subject to the same risks as on-premise data. Consequently, it should not be underestimated that there are various situations in which the loss of this data is possible. Below are the main cases:

- Accidental deletion: this is the most common cause that occurs even just for changes that later turn out to be incorrect.

- Confusion in retention criteria: data retention is the data retention period and in the corporate environment people are asked to respect it by following certain policies, but management is very difficult.

- Insider threats: While hard to imagine happening, it is one of the most common cases. The risk that an internal employee could delete vital company data is very frequent.

- External threats: it is now known that cyber criminals are increasingly attempting to infiltrate corporate IT infrastructures to attack them via ransomware.

- Legal requests: It may happen that certain emails, even very old ones, files and other data are necessary during legal and legal compliance procedures.

Microsoft 365 backup: total protection

Uploading your data to the cloud is like taking money into a bank: the data is yours, but up to a certain point! Therefore, it is important to have a copy of company data even at another provider and another data center. Thinking that the Microsoft 365 cloud backup service is sufficient is wrong.

In case of problems with a provider, to ensure that you are protected, having a copy elsewhere is always good practice. For example, there may be legal and compliance reasons why the provider may suspend access to your data, without you having the opportunity for a quick resolution. Therefore, having access to a copy of your data is strategic.

Additionally, if a migration were to become necessary, it would be difficult to export large amounts of data.

Conclusion

Microsoft can only offer recovery options that are time-limited and likely to contain obsolete data. This is why we strongly recommend activating an external Office 365 backup solution, now known as Micorosft 365, which allows for high-level and more accessible recovery.

Utixo, a primary partner of Microsoft Cloud Services, provides cloud backup solutions (cloud2cloud). These include the complete management of backup-restore-disaster recovery processes in compliance with the GDPR. In fact, they take place on a platform external to Microsoft and on European data centers under European jurisdiction.