Data in Office 365 isn’t backed up automatically

Your emails have been moved to Office 365, and you’re starting to use OneDrive to store you files in the Cloud as well. You can can access your emails and files from everywhere… what’s not to love?

While Office 365 is great, the biggest misconception is that it also performs backups for you. Office 365 offers basic protection to deal with some of the things that could damage your data, but there are things it doesn’t protect you from, Microsoft will only guarantee 90% of your data backup for just 30 days. Let’s go through some scenario’s.

Hackers

You love Office 365 because it’s easy accessible from everywhere, right? When it’s easy accessible for you, it will also be for others. Email addresses can be easily guessed and/or retrieved from the company website, and most hackers are more then capable to find out if you are using Office 365 (which is pretty easy). With your email address anyone can browse to the Office 365 login portal, and just try to access your mailbox. Once they’ve got access to your mailbox, they can do whatever they like, for example sending emails to all you contacts or deleting your mailbox. But having access to your mailbox, will also give them access to your files store in OneDrive or even worse, your company’s SharePoint environment. While ACIT can also implement solutions to add another layer of security to your Office 365 account (Multi Factor Authentication), the only way to recover your emails, files stored in OneDrive and/or SharePoint environment, is from backup.

Virus

The company’s network is protected with a WatchGuard firewall inspecting every packet going through the network, and all the computers have up-to-date Anti-Virus installed. Emails are being scanned by a 3rd party Anti-Spam filter, so what can go wrong?
Besides all the security layers implemented, there’s always the treat of getting attacked due to a software vulnerability that’s unknown (zero-day vulnerability). Furthermore, you can’t expect your employees home network to be as well protected. What happens if the employee works remote, opens Gmail or Outlook and clicks on a link within an email which activates a virus?

Without a cloud backup solution for Office 365, you are missing the foundational piece of data protection.

Employee that leaves

After an employee left the company, you discover they have emptied their mailbox and files in OneDrive and deleted information that hasn’t been shared with anyone.

With a cloud backup solution, you can recover any data that has been maliciously deleted.

Human error

Even the most trusted employee can make a mistake and delete or overwrite a file. And sometimes it can take time before you realised you’ve removed or overwritten an important file.

With a cloud backup solution, lost data (emails, OneDrive or SharePoint) can be quickly found and restored right back where it was with no overwrites.

ACIT uses SkyKick Cloud Backup to protect customers with a fast, easy way to restore business data quickly and deliver a great customer experience. In the absence of an Office 365 backup solution, if data can be recovered at all, it can take as much as six engineer hours to recover a single file. And the cost of recovering an entire folder or mailbox can be unpredictable. Between lost productivity and IT costs, a single recovery can be more expensive than an entire year of a backup solution.