7 Reasons Why Microsoft 365 Backup is Critical

Organizations continue to move to Microsoft 365 for the ease of collaboration in the cloud. Today, it’s at 300M commercial seats and growing.1 As the pandemic expanded in early 2020, so did the need for enabling remote working. This caused a massive adoption of Microsoft Teams, and it’s not slowing down. In only three months last year, it went from 145M to 250M monthly active users.2

Throughout this time, Veeam`s Backup for Microsoft 365, has safeguarded customer’s Office 365 data, including Microsoft Teams with their purpose-built Teams backup support. In 2021, Veeam recorded that their Office 365 backup solution had more than 210,000 downloads, 25,000 customers and 8.5M users under paid contract. Veeam is now a leader for Microsoft 365 backup in terms of overall market share.

While you are reading this, you may be thinking “Doesn’t Microsoft take care of Office 365 backup?”

It’s important to remember that SaaS platform providers, like Microsoft 365, take on the responsibility of application uptime and the underlying infrastructure. But it is the customer’s responsibility to manage and protect their vital business data, according to Microsoft’s Shared Responsibility Model. It’s also worth noting that while many of the built-in native features within Microsoft 365 can feel like backups, none of them adhere to the common definition of a backup: A separate copy of data stored in a separate location which can be quickly and easily recovered from.

What are 7 reasons why backing up Office 365 data is critical?

1. Accidental deletion: The first reason, is actually the most common concern for data loss in Microsoft 365. If you delete a user, whether you meant to or not, that deletion is replicated across the network. A backup can restore that user, either to on-premises Exchange or Office 365.
2. Retention policy gaps and confusion: Retention policies in Microsoft 365 are designed to help organizations comply with regulations, laws and internal policies that require that they retain or delete content, they are not backups. But even if you do rely on your retention policy in place of a backup, they are hard to keep up with, let alone manage. A backup provides longer, more accessible retention all protected and stored in one place for easy recovery.
3. Internal security threats: When we think of threats to our business, we usually think in terms of protecting against external ones. But many businesses are experiencing threats from the inside, and they are happening more often than you think. Having a high-grade recovery solution mitigates the risk of critical data being lost or destroyed.
4. External security threats: Ransomware is becoming more and more sophisticated, and criminals are finding more ways to reach our users, deceiving them into clicking a link so they can encrypt the entire organization’s data for ransom. A backup can easily restore data to an instance before the attack.
5. Legal and compliance requirements: There are eDiscovery capabilities built-into Microsoft 365, but a third-party backup solution is purpose-built to easily search within a backup and quickly bring back data to meet any regulatory compliance needs.
6. Managing hybrid email deployments and migrations to Microsoft 365: Whether you are migrating to Microsoft 365 or have a blend of on-premises Exchange and Microsoft 365 users, the exchange data should be managed and protected the same way, making the source location irrelevant.
7. Teams data structure: The Teams backend is much more complex than many realize. Teams is not a self-contained application, meaning the data generated in Teams resides in other applications, such as Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive. With this added layer of complexity, ensuring the data is adequately protected is paramount.

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