With cloud technology becoming more popular among technology leaders, it is easy for data to get lost among the hype. Michael Gogos, Product Manager, Quest Data Protection, offers some top tips to protecting Office 365 environments and bolstering backup and recovery processes.
With today’s global workforce, more and more organisations are leveraging the cloud to collaborate and ensure Business Continuity and productivity. Microsoft 365, particularly, is gaining traction as the productivity platform of choice. How can organisations and users feel confident their systems and data are protected in this cloud environment?
While Microsoft Office 365 offers a number of system availability and data protection capabilities, data can still be damaged or lost based on several unforeseen situations – including internal employee accidental changes and deletions, as well as external malicious threat vectors like viruses and ransomware.
Here are four tips to bolster your Office 365 backup and recovery processes.
Take control
SaaS applications, and the cloud in general, is just as susceptible to outages and recovery challenges as traditional on-premises data centres. This includes infrastructure failures or accidental mistakes, to purposeful malicious attacks. To help mitigate, IT teams should perform their own Office 365 backups. Maintain multiple copies of your backups on different devices and locations as this is one of your best defences against malicious attacks. Performing your own Office 365 backup allows the business to restore business-critical data to another location or system, including an on-premises resource. This makes it easier to help reduce the risk of business downtime, keeps productivity in-check and protects your brand.
Familiarise yourself with retention policies
Office 365 offers retention policies but be sure to read the fine print. Not all are considered long-term data retention required by various compliance regulations. Also, retention policies don’t protect data that is accidentally or maliciously changed. To bolster your Office 365 backup and recovery footprint, turn to third-party solutions that support a 3-2-1 backup strategy – one that allows the business to have multiple copies of data on separate devices and in different locations. This will give you the protection you need and the ability to recover changed, damaged or deleted files or data. Additionally, there is no limit to how long you choose to retain your data, making it easier to meet necessary compliance requirements.
Don’t use data availability groups for individual mailbox backup and restore
Every mailbox database in Office 365 is hosted in a database availability group (DAG) and replicated to geographically dispersed data centres within region. Although every mailbox database has four copies, one of these copies is configured as a lagged copy, making it vulnerable to human error or malicious attacks. Find a solution that gives IT teams a granular level view of recovery options that provides them with the power to restore data – such as entire mailbox, individual emails and email attachments – when and where they want.
Understand the value of your Office 365 data
Often, it is not only the files or emails that are important, but also the context and connections these emails and files have to other data. Imagine trying to rebuild that context when all you have are individual documents or chat records? This is where the true business value in Office 365 comes from. Consider Microsoft Teams, which has quickly become one of the most popular productivity and connectivity applications used by organisations. Teams allows co-workers to share and collaborate on documents and wikis and communicate across chat and video meetings. Protecting just the individual documents or chat records without the surrounding context of the team structure, connections and history, means that the business value of that context is unprotected.
Conclusion
It’s critical that businesses have a complete understanding of all the data across Office 365 environments, and what makes this data important to the business. Having this visibility and a solid understanding of the context of all this data, will help ensure organisations implement strong backup and recovery processes across Office 365.
