Should you be backing up Office 365?

ITSo you’ve moved your emails (and possibly files) to Microsoft’s Office 365 package which is great – someone else worries about making sure it’s always working properly, always running the latest software and security patches and best of all you don’t have that headache of replacing your server every few years  All this for a nice manageable monthly fee.  Perfect.

But do you still need to be backing up Office 365?  Surely Microsoft has that covered for you?

Well they do to a point.   Microsoft goes to great lengths to make sure that the Office 365 service is looked after.  It replicates your data across numerous different data centers so that if there’s an issue in one location you won’t notice.  It prides itself on a 99.9% service up-time which they make public each quarter.  In summary, Microsoft are extremely unlikely to lose your email data.

However while Microsoft puts a lot of effort into its service, it’s not for your benefit.  It’s to make sure that any loss at their end can be recovered, quickly, and so the publicity surrounding Office 365 isn’t harmed by data loss stories.  What Office 365’s backup does not protect you from is user error – a user who accidentally deletes an email and needs it back, overwrites an important file or removes a folder in OneDrive that they then realise was important to keep or even an employee maliciously deleting emails or files before they leave.

We recommend that if your emails are important to you and you use Office 365 then you need to be using a third-party backup solution to protect you from data loss.

So what’s the solution? We strongly recommend a third-party software solution which makes sure you have a proper backup of your Office 365 data:

• Office 365 email, calendars, contacts, files and folders are automatically backed up multiple times each day
• Quickly and easily restore (or ask us to) emails, files or folders that need recovering
• Take a snapshot of an employee’s emails or files before they leave so you still have a copy when you delete their account or if they empty their email before going
• Have a backup is HIPPA and Safe Harbor compliant – if that’s important to your business (it probably is, or will be soon!)

There’s an old adage that backup is only important to people who have lost data in the past but at Systemagic we’ve made backup and business continuity a key focus for our clients.

If you’re using Office 365 and aren’t sure whether you should be backing it up why not get in touch for a chat?

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