Is your data actually backed up?

In today’s ‘data-sensitive’ world where the loss of consumer or employee information could have severe monetary and reputational repercussions; it’s increasingly important to ensure that all data is backed up regularly and properly. 

With all that said, what is a backup? In its simplest form, a backup involves making a copy of your data and storing it independently from the source. Backups are vital as they allay risks and guarantee that you’ll be able to restore that data when you need it.   

Many Office 365 customers mistakenly believe that Microsoft’s Litigation Hold and Geo-Redundancy provide adequate backup for their business. Litigation hold is one of Microsoft’s compliance tools aimed at preventing the deletion or modification of mailbox items, however it is not an adequate backup solution on its own. Additionally, litigation hold is only available for mailboxes and not SharePoint or OneDrive data. Geo-redundancy, on the other hand, protects against site or hardware failure, so if there is an infrastructure outage, your users will remain productive but unaware of any underlying issues. 

Other things to note about Microsoft’s Litigation Hold and reasons why it is not a suitable backup option: 

• It offers an on-off button which can potentially be disabled by mistake, accident or cyber-attack meaning all data will be lost, 
• Recovery performance is very poor because it’s not designed to restore emails or user accounts, 
• If you accidentally delete a user, their on-hold mailbox and OneDrive account are also deleted, 
• When a user leaves the company, you must keep paying for that user in order to retain the data on hold or look for another loophole that may potentially trigger a different compliance issue,   
• Once the hold period expires, the data is deleted for good. 

So what's the solution?

Veeam® Backup for Microsoft Office 365 eliminates the risk of losing access and control over your Office 365 data including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Teams – so that your data is always protected and accessible. You’ll also have the power to securely backup Office 365 and: 

• Quickly restore individual Office 365 email, files and sites with industry-leading recovery flexibility,
• Meet legal and compliance requirements with efficient eDiscovery of Office 365 items,
• Store data based on long-term retention policies for regulatory or compliance needs, 
• Ensure you recover exactly what you need — no more, no less — with granular advanced search and find functionality, 
• Increase security for Office 365 backup data with multi-factor authentication, 
• Protect your Office 365 data from accidental deletion, security threats and retention policy gaps. 

In choosing a backup solution, ask yourself the following questions: 

• How do I retain SharePoint and OneDrive data? 
• How do I differentiate between archives and backups? 
• What do I do to prevent human mistakes and malicious attacks? 
• If I were to restore an email from an ex-employee and the only clue I had was that the attachment contained the word ‘money’ in its file name, how would I go about this request and how long would restoration take? 

To find out whether Veeam could be the right backup solution for your business, click the button below to download the FREE 30-day trial license. 

To request a no-obligation quote from Subnet for Veeam's Backup for Office 365 or to receive help with installing the free trial license, fill in the form below!