With more than 300 million users, Microsoft 365 continues to be the leading productivity software suite used by businesses. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, many companies established remote work policies. These employees needed to have convenient access to their email, chat, meeting, file management, and productivity apps. In turn, the need for programs such as Microsoft Teams grew from 150 million users to 250 million users within months.
Many companies found Microsoft 365 to be a useful and reliable software suite. To ensure the service quality of the platform, Microsoft works diligently at maintaining the uptime and efficiency of its infrastructure. However, according to Microsoft’s Shared Responsibility Model, businesses are responsible for maintaining and protecting their data. In addition, Varonis stated in a 2019 Global Data Risk Report that the average organization only protects 78% of its data. This means organizations typically leave 22% of their data unaccounted for.
Therefore, we recommend storing another copy of your Microsoft 365 data using a third-party solution, such as Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365. This solution can store a second copy of data in an external storage service, such as Amazon S3, Azure Blob, IBM Cloud, or an S3-compatible on-premises provider.
You might be asking, “Doesn’t Microsoft already backup Microsoft 365?” The platform does synchronize locally stored data to Microsoft’s cloud and provides limited restore features. However, relying solely on their cloud for backups would mean leaving your data eggs in one basket. This setup increases the risk of losing data permanently if you overwrite or delete files within the Microsoft 365 platform.
A third-party backup solution can protect your data against loss due to disasters like accidental deletions, security threats, and application errors. Microsoft 365 backup solutions create copies of data from Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams. Then, the solution writes the data into a second storage location. If any disasters, such as a ransomware attack, cause data loss or corruption, your business can restore this data in a timely and precise manner.
As more users work from home and adopt Microsoft 365, backing up the platform’s data becomes increasingly important. If you’re interested in doing this through our Data Backup Services in Orange County, contact us by emailing info@swifttechsolutions.com or calling 877-794-3811.