Data Backup Digest

Druva’s recent update, rolled out over the past couple of weeks, now allows customers to backup and recover their Slack and Microsoft Teams data.

Druva supports other Office 365 functionality, like Exchange emails, OneDrive and SharePoint. By expanding to support Teams, customers can restore Team interactions to previous points in time while preserving underlying interdependencies.

The current process to restore a Microsoft Teams session in Office 365 is time consuming and messy. It means searching around in different recovery bins and aligning time stamps. When you consider the interdependencies, that Teams channels have messages and files that can be referenced elsewhere, it becomes a very difficult task to restore Teams to a previous version.

This new integration from Druva changes that. The data protection platform is pitching the feature primarily at legal teams. It allows them to undertake e-discovery on Teams conversations, but also share the same backup pool of things like OneDrive files and SharePoint documents.

Slack has no point-in-time recovery capabilities as default, so Druva now allows user interaction to be backed up, which is great news for the many companies that are now relying on Slack as their primary inter-company messaging service.

The Microsoft Teams feature will be available as part of the Druva Office 365 protection product, while Slack data protection will require a separate license.

Prem Ananthakrishnan, the vice president of products and technology alliances at Druva, claims that these are gaps that customers have noticed, especially in the Office 365 environment, and that the new abilities offered are extremely important.

It’s a similar comparison to something like Salesforce. A hugely popular SaaS application, Salesforce does not have a native way to roll back the entire application. Customers recognise the need, though, and thus employ the use of third-party services to achieve it.

Druva isn’t the only vendor to offer Microsoft Teams backup, though there aren’t many. Veeam and AvePoint also provide the service. Similarly, backing up Slack at an enterprise level isn’t common, though AvePoint can migrate data from Slack to Teams and then back that up.

Smaller vendors are attempting to differentiate themselves and stand out in the market by offering Slack backups – those like CloudHQ and Backupery.

There’s a need for these vendors to provide the service because the application vendors don’t. They usually only guarantee the availability of the actual service, not the protection of the user data on it. In fact, take a look at the terms of service and you’ll likely find it stipulated that the responsibility of data protection lies with the customer.

It’s a popular myth that data is safe because it’s in the cloud, but businesses are quickly learning that their data isn’t automatically safe just because they are served SaaS through the cloud.

Both Teams and Slack protection are already available. Druva plans for future updates to integrate with platforms like ServiceNow, Splunk and Okta. Ananthakrishnan said that the company is always looking to support more SaaS applications, especially as customer adoption of them grows.