A growing number of companies are turning to Microsoft Office 365. Organizations of nearly every size increasingly rely on Office 365 for storing, managing and sharing files and other data. This includes everything from Word docs and Excel spreadsheets to Exchange email, Outlook calendars and SharePoint.
It’s easy to see why. As a cloud-based solution, Office 365 is incredibly convenient and powerful. It also largely removes the burden and costs of managing on-premise servers for a lot of common business IT needs.
But what Office 365 does not do—and what a lot of companies don’t take seriously enough—is provide adequate backup and recovery protection for your data.
Your data, your responsibility
I recently took part in a webinar on Office 365 data protection, sponsored by Asigra, the data backup and recovery solution we use with our clients. One of the central messages I wanted to convey along with the rest of the panel of IT services experts was this: even in the cloud, you own the data and you need to have a plan to control it.
Companies entrust Microsoft and its Office 365 platform with much more than they even realize. Many organizations assume Office 365 completely protects their data. It does not.
This is not Microsoft’s problem to solve—it’s yours!
Microsoft cannot protect against human error, which is a leading reason why organizations need to recover files.
Nor can Microsoft ensure that your data in Office 365 is reliable, never becomes corrupted, or will be properly archived when employees leave your organization.
Office 365 does not guarantee data recovery, either. Microsoft only guarantees 99.9% availability. That’s not the same thing.
Yes, using Office 365 largely eliminates the risk of hardware failure as a potential source of downtime for many companies. But you cannot assume that because it’s managed by Microsoft, Office 365 will have zero outages. Even in the cloud, they do happen—in fact, a major outage occured on June 30.
Plan accordingly
Many companies are drawn to the prospect of financial savings by using Office 365. Not having to pay for and manage hardware is a tantalizing prospect. But before you reallocate all that budget savings, you still need to factor in how you will manage and protect the data once it’s in the cloud.
For too many organizations, developing a backup and recovery plan for Office 365 data is an afterthought. The webinar offers a lot of insights into critical topics like best practices, retention policies and why you need granular controls to customize backup and recovery processes.
Register to access the webinar replay:
“Why Data Protection for Office 365 is Critical”
As always, if you have questions about any of these topics or need help assessing your backup and recovery plan, please get in touch!