Data Backup Digest

Many businesses now use software as a service. Microsoft has been making a strong push for their ecosystem recently, which has meant that enterprise adoption of Office 365 is on the rise.

The benefits to operating within the cloud are clear. The costs are lower, the management is easier, it can be scaled both ways, and it integrates with existing systems. Data that was originally stored in large and expensive data centres is now being moved offsite to infrastructures provided by the software owner.

Office is software common to enterprises, so the extension to allow for online use with Office 365 was obvious. With it, users can create, edit and share their Office files from across all their devices. This means that a document can be worked on in the office on a desktop and then continued elsewhere on a tablet, for example.

Although there are positives to using Office 365, it doesn’t mean that the importance of data can be forgotten. The application and related data may be on Microsoft’s cloud, but the business is still responsible for that data. It needs to be kept secure and backed up.

Speaking generally, even if a provider does offer protection or uptime agreements, it’s not suitable to rely on these. Data control needs to rely totally with the business – though it’s fine to have the provider offer protection as a secondary layer, it shouldn’t be the sole reliant.

Office 365 does offer some data protection, including a guarantee of 99.9 percent uptime and redundancy through all the stages. All deleted data in Office 365 is no longer retrievable after 30 days. Those times can be extended, but it doesn’t come cheap. And if you let your subscription lapse or don’t renew, all of your data will be removed after 90 days.

The solution is to back up your data. Not only does it ensure compliance, but it also means that you have cover in an audit as you’ll have full control over where that data is stored. You could also suffer financial consequences if your Office 365 data is lost without an immediate backup copy. Also, if you ever wished to change vendor then you wouldn’t find your data locked solely to Microsoft.

One solution to help you manage your Office 365 backups is Asigra Cloud Backup. Regardles of whether the data resides on physical machines, mobile endpoints or cloud services, Asigra is capable of backing it all up.

It can handle your Office 365 backups, regardless of which version you’re using. The backup copies are deduplicated, compressed, encrypted and then reside on a secure private, public or hybrid cloud, depending on your choice. Backups can be restored straight into Office 365 or another location, giving you the ultimate flexibility.

As with all good backup systems, you can also schedule automatic creation of data sets across all the Office 365 services, like Exchange Online and OneDrive. You can narrow this protection down to particular users, applications or data sets, as the demand arises. Alternatively, if you don’t wish to define rules at a granular level, you can set automatic backup across the whole service.

Software as a service is great and your business shouldn’t be put off from using it – but just remember that you still need to back up the data that it creates and stores.