Do I need to backup my Office 365 / M365 data?

Cloud computing, and more precise, software as a service, has brought a host of opportunities for businesses to be more competitive. Adopting new technologies and services has never been so easy, allowing many smaller companies to gain a competitive edge.

With such growth in cloud services adoption, the need to understand data, security and recoverability has never been so critical. Many people are under the false pretence that all cloud services backup their data, but they could not be further from the truth. This article will discuss why you should review your data backup policy, including Office 365 and similar software as a service platform. We will also touch on how, when and what to do in the event of data loss in Office 365.

Does Microsoft backup my Office 365 data?

In the true meaning of Backup, No, Microsoft does not backup your data in the way you would require it. They do have retention periods built into the service across Email, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams. This retention capability means that you can recover data in deletions for a set number of days, but after that retention period, there is no data recovery option.

What availability and resiliency are there in Office 365?

The Office 365 platform is a highly available, fault-tolerant, multi-region collaboration service. Your data would be stored in more than one data centre within your region and replicated to another province to make it highly available. Fault tolerance in terms of the service would be by design and would allow for seamless business continuity in any failures.

Why do I need to backup my Office 365 data?

The onus of your data and data privacy and recoverability is your responsibility. Microsoft does not provide its service for protecting and retaining your data, so appreciating this risk should be high on your businesses’ disaster recovery and business continuity scope.

As such, should the event arise where data is lost, compromised, hit with ransomware, or deleted past the retention period – you should have provisions to mitigate events.

How do I backup Office 365 services?

Thankfully, several backup vendors offer various levels of data backup capabilities, and the right option boils down to your requirements. With the likes of cloud-hosted, automatic backups, application-specific options available – there will be a solution for all needs.

What about Backup and being complaint?

Your industry and regulation will determine and maybe dictate your data recoverability requirements. The ability to match an RPO and RTO based on data classification and criteria would mean that your solution would need to be near real-time. But all of these things can be addressed with the correct Office 365 cloud backup solution.

How easy is it to backup my Office 365 data?

Depending on your requirements, it can be effortless to set up the backup service. Many vendors offer two variations: On-Prem (the likes of Veaam) and cloud-based (AvePoint). Both models have their advantages and disadvantages, and more often than not, it boils down to cost, requirements and skills.

Will all my Office 365 be backed up?

Depending on your Office 365 subscription, you can backup all service or some. The likes of Email, SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, M365 services are all containers that you will be able to backup.

How frequently will data be backed up?

This is down to your requirements; Many backup solutions offer incremental RPO/RTO based capabilities, which means that it can begin backing up the data every x minutes.

Will my backup solution impact the Office 365 service?

No. Microsoft has done a stellar job in allowing for integration into its platform for back-end tasks. With its self-throttling functionality, it will always be self-aware of any wider performance issues that could occur.

What should my Office 365 backup and recovery policy be?

Your business requirements should determine your backup policy. At the very minimum, you should have a backup that runs daily for all your data in the Office 365 service. This data should then have a retention period set, and this can range from one week to multiple years.

What are Office 365 backup best practices?

Whilst it is not the scope of this article to deliver a backup policy, Teck Genius would recommend the following nine practices.

1. Identify and backup all your Office 365 data and services.

2. Identify the amount and size of data that you have that needs to be backed up.

3. Ensure you have daily backups that are automated and that there is monitoring and alerting on success and failures that get emailed to you.

4. Follow a daily, full, incremental method for your backups where perhaps you perform a daily full backup on Day 1 and from day 2 to 7; you have incremental backups. You then apply retention on the 7th-day backup and keep it for a set period.

5. Put in place retention settings across all the data backups.

6. Enable versioning of backups and files so that you can recover faster.

7. Ensure that the location where the backup is stored has encryption and you hold the encryption keys.

8. Choose a solution that allows for granular file-level to recover and offers data restored to alternate locations.

9. Decide on whether you want the solution to be Cloud-based on On-prem.

We hope this article has allowed you to think of your backup policy for your Office 365 services. Teck Genius would be happy to have a no-obligation chat about how we can help your data backup requirements. For more information, please contact us here