Recently we have been talking to more and more of our customers around the integrity of their data within cloud services, most notably Microsoft Office 365 but the concepts discussed here are also transferable to other cloud services.
Office 365 is ubiquitous within business and Lucidity are constantly migrating customers and their data into the service.
Some Office 365 facts and figures
- Millions of Users: There are over 120 million Office 365 active commercial users.
- Crazy Growth: The percentage of organisations running SharePoint Online rose from 22% in 2016 to 56% in 2017.
- Cloud Domination: 58% of sensitive data in the cloud is stored in Microsoft Office documents.
- And It’s Only the Beginning – More than half of all commercial (business) Office users are using Office 365 rather than standalone/perpetual Office. Microsoft is expecting two-thirds of its business Office customers will be using Office 365 in 2019.
(Source of above data included here)
High Availability vs Backup
Whilst talking with our customers most are shocked by one large fact that is often overlooked, Microsoft does NOT backup your data!
Let me explain, Microsoft goes to enormous lengths to ensure the Office 365 service is always available, they replicate all services and data across multiple regions (geo-replication) to ensure your current data is always available. Microsoft does not backup or archive your data to any location where the data owner is in control.
Shocking right? Like other aspects of moving to the cloud there many areas that cannot be assumed and backup is one. A move from a traditional onsite email and file service to Office 365 is a move forward in so many ways however it is also a move backwards when it comes to having control of your data.
It’s true there are specific “recycle bins” to recover email items, SharePoint and OneDrive for business items etc, these do not constitute a controllable and long-term backup. It’s simple to sum up; once an item, be that a single file, an entire folder or an entire user is purged from Office365 it is gone.
Backing up Office 365
This is where a solution is required to extract all Office 365 data for an organisation and store it in another location i.e. A backup.
The backup is under your control and external to the Office 365 service the Microsoft provides. You control where your data is kept, how often the backup is taken and most importantly how long your backup data is retained. Of course, there is a cost to running this backup solution and as such many organisations that we talk to about this fall into one of the two categories:
- Informed and accept the business risk
- Do not accept the business risk and therefore backup Office 365.
There are other benefits with an Office 365 backup solution; some businesses have compliance requirements, these may be that all data needs to be retained for a certain period of time. An Office 365 backup solution designed for this scenario provides a controllable and accountable method to retain all data securely therefore adhering to the requirement.
If you have made the move to Office 365 and would like to feel safe in the knowledge that your data is backed up and retained for a period that you as a business define, then contact Lucidity to discuss your Office 365 backup options.
