Why you should be backing up your Office 365 data

All your email and files are stored in the cloud on business subscriptions to Microsoft's Office 365 so there's no need to back that data up because Microsoft do that for us, right? Wrong.

Let's have a look at what Microsoft actually provides.

Microsoft do back up Office 365 but it's not that straight-forward because those backups are there to provide certain guarantees of uptime. Microsoft also provide physical security in their data centres, data replication and redundancy. They protect your data from natural disasters, hardware/software failures, power outages etc.

However, what about one of the following scenarios:

• a user deletes a file?

• a user deletes a bunch of contacts or some calendar events?

• a user needs to retrieve a file deleted six months ago?

• your files are encrypted by some malware?

The answer is in any of those circumstances (and many more) is that the recovery of that data would be down to you.

You are responsible for the protection of your data from human error, malicious activity, hacking, viruses etc. 

The solution is to make sure you have a reliable, automated backup of your Office 365 data in place. This could be a cloud-to-cloud backup service or a backup service that pulls the data down to your physical site. There are a number of solutions available, the choice of which depends on a number of factors such as number of users, your existing infrastructure and budget.

To re-cap, having your data stored with Microsoft's Office 365 does NOT mean that you would necessarily be able to recover that data should any of it go missing or become inaccessible. If you would like to talk to someone about how you can protect your Office 365 data please click here to find out more.