The cloud has changed how we do business, and Microsoft Office 365 delivers the cloud to many organizations. The subscription-based cloud productivity suite boasts more than 7 million users, who now access the familiar Office applications on many devices, including desktop PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones. Office 365 is one of the quickest adopted cloud applications in history. However, it lacks one crucial thing: a reliable enterprise backup system.
What is Microsoft doing to backup data?
Microsoft is doing a lot to ensure files and documents are always accessible and backed up. It even prides itself in its 99.9% service up-time with regular backups. In a blog post on its site, Microsoft outlined some techniques it uses to ensure data is backed up. It constantly replicates data between data centers, and stores data in completely redundant environments with backup and restoring capabilities. In other words, if something happens to one of Microsoft’s data centers, you will still most likely retain every single one of your emails!
Why should you have your own backup?
While Microsoft does replicate and backup its Office 365 service, it only protects its own interests by making sure any loss on its end can be recovered. Its backup does not protect you from user errors such as accidental deletion or an employee maliciously deleting files.
Organizations need a third-party solution to deal with this very prevalent form of data loss.
What options are out there?
There are more and more third-party backup applications for Office 365 coming to market. Of course, some are more reliable than others. IT industry news publication, The Register, recently published an article when Asigra (the cloud backup solution Echopath uses) added Office 365 support.
Our Office 365 backup solution is a cloud-to-cloud service that backs up Office 365 data to the Echopath private cloud. The system provides support for documents, spreadsheets, Exchange, SharePoint workspaces, and Office 365’s own OneDrive repositories. You can control the size, frequency, and granularity of backup and recovery operations. The system provides vast control when it comes to the number of file versions needed to be kept and retention rule settings.
In addition, you can store your Office 365 data in the same container as all your other corporate data, providing peace of mind to any IT manager.
Whether your data is in the cloud like Office 365, or on your corporate network, it’s smart to keep a backup in a separate location. Cloud-to-cloud backup solutions are coming to market and leading the front to protect data in the cloud and in the office.