Office 365: Do I Need a Backup Plan?

Posted on April 25th 2019

Today more and more companies are moving to cloud based applications, such as Office 365 as they allow for the data to be available and accessible from anywhere on any device. However, there is widespread misconception about the backup of the data stored in Office 365. We are regularly asked if it’s the responsibility of Microsoft or us as a Managed Service provider.

In short, the answer is no to both. Data stored in the cloud is still vulnerable to permanent loss occurring from user deletion (either accidentally or maliciously), ransomware attacks, data being overwritten or corrupted. An astonishing 1 in 3 companies report losing data stored in cloud-based applications. That means the permanent deletion of potentially hundreds of work hours.

Shared responsibility model:

Microsoft operates on the shared responsibility model, meaning that they maintain their infrastructure but recovering your company data is your responsibility. Microsoft has recently issued the following ‘shared responsibility’ statement:

It’s important to understand the division of responsibility between you and Microsoft. On-premises, you own the whole stack, but as you move to the cloud, some responsibilities transfer to Microsoft. The following graphic illustrates the areas of responsibility:

You are always responsible for the following, regardless of the type of deployment:

Data
Endpoints
Account
Access management

What this means for you:

If your business is running Office 365 it is imperative to have an appropriate back up plan in place to ensure your critical business data stored in Office 365 applications such as SharePoint, OneDrive and Exchange is secure and protected. So should the worst happen you can rest assured your business can recover quickly.

At BCN Group our role to advise and educate our valued customers with regards to best practice, particularly where backup and data loss is concerned.

To this end we can now offer you backup and recovery for your Office 365 environment. With BCN Group Office 365 Backup you benefit from automatic backups 3 times a day that capture point-in-time snapshots of each users’ Microsoft Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint Online, Calendar and Contacts. There’s also fast and granular restore functionality to recover lost files and folders directly to a user’s account.

If you want to learn more about our Office 365 back up solutions, feel free to contact us by clicking the button below.