Why Protect Your Office 365 Data?

Office 365 is pretty sweet. It’s accessible from everywhere. It’s self-updating. It lets you have file storage, email, and more, without all the hassle of running your own server farm in the corner of your office. Now, you can use that office space to house a new hire who’ll develop the hot new product that will rock your industry and make your company the big bucks. But that new hire will generate data and will need to send and receive emails using that Office 365 solution you implemented.

So, you may be thinking, “All that data is up in Office365! It’s totally safe from threats and disasters!” And you, my dear reader, would be—if not exactly wrong—at least short-sighted. Microsoft will do their best to keep things secure, but all your data—whether it be files, email or anything else in the cloud—is your responsibility.

Now you may still be asking yourself, “What could go wrong? It’s in the cloud! The cloud is safe!” Again, ponder these scenarios.

• A happy clicker accidentally reorganizes your file structure.
• A piece of software that writes files to your OneDrive has a bug and makes small, but damaging changes to important files.
• Some spyware or malware gets a hold of your data and is either dormant for a long time, or slowly rewrites your data.
• You’re bound by law to provide data retention on your data. This timeframe is normally in terms of years rather than months.

Office 365 can provide restores, but only up to 30 days (for most available products). Need a file or email restored that’s older than 30 days? Then you’ll need to have another data protection product, like Veeam for Office 365, configured.

Veeam for Office 365 protects all of your OneDrive, SharePoint, and Mailbox data, retains it for as long as necessary, and keeps the backups in a location of your choosing. Store it locally or in another cloud resource of your choosing, such as Azure or AWS. When it’s time to restore the data, you can pick individual files, folders, mailboxes, or messages and restore them back to Office 365, or to another location (e.g. a local file server or local Exchange server). It’s your data, so you get to decide how to protect it and where to restore it to.

Picking what data to restore is easily done through Veeam Explorer. If you currently use Veeam Backup and Replication products, you’ll feel right at home with the user interface. Using Explorer, you can browse files and messages, perform searches for the files themselves, or search by metadata such as: file type, access time, message owner, and many more. Once you find the files and/or messages you want to restore, you have a few options. You can return them to where they were backed-up from (with the original file name or with a “Restored” prefix), restore them to a different OneDrive or Mailbox, email them, or zip them up and store them locally.

Getting your data into Office 365 is a big step in any organization’s cloud journey, but without proper data protection techniques, you’re just as exposed to data loss as if the data was still on-premises. Using Veeam for Office 365 will help protect your cloud data to let that new hire make that new product to take over your marketplace.

The industry’s best Microsoft Office 365 backup solution just got better.

Do you have any data protection projects or concerns? The disaster recovery experts at Anexinet can help you design and implement the DR solution you need to protect your data in nearly all on-premises and cloud-based environments. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us with any DR questions. We’d love to help you get started.