You may be using Microsoft’s Office 365, the cloud-based solution that provides enhanced business productivity. You may love its advanced security features and excellent protection for safeguarding your business information. When you work in Office 365, you are working “in the cloud.” This is a fantastic way to allow employees from multiple locations to collaborate on projects, for access to business data when “on the road” and away from your office computer, and for a safer, advanced login procedure. These are all excellent reasons to use Office 365 to take your business to a higher level. But, did you know that there is one thing that Office 365 does not do? It does not do complete file backups! Why is it important to back up Office 365 files? That is what we are going to discuss right here. We look at what Office 365 does for you, what data of yours it has, and what will be lost if there were a terrible glitch in their system or yours.
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Microsoft’s Office 365 is a mature software system first released in 2011 and updated on a regular basis. It is an online or cloud-based system so that you connect to the computer programs and your data in remote servers. The software system includes Microsoft’s Outlook, OneDrive, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Yammer, and others. Businesses love this approach for several reasons. Here are just a few.
Office 365 is an efficient way to do business in the modern world and that efficiency translates into lower expenses, greater cash flow, and higher profits. If you are not currently using Office 365 and are interested in learning more, contact us at Exigo Business Solutions in the Kansas City area.
The answer is that pretty much everything that you work with every day is part of Office 365 (or whatever cloud-based system you use). All of the data in all of your Excel spreadsheets, all of the Word documents you produce or receive, and all of the items in your database are stored in the cloud by Microsoft. All of your emails and other communications are in the cloud with Office 365 as well.
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Yes, they do. But, the problem that we see is that Microsoft focuses on providing a collaborative and dynamic online workplace with security features that lead the industry. Their accessibility, compliance, and privacy features are great. On the other hand, they are not backup gurus. Where they fall down is in not backing up everything forever and in the difficulty of retrieving what they have backed up.
The data retention policies in Office 365 vary with the specific feature or program. Both SharePoint and OneDrive have 93-day recycle bins but they may be emptied at any time. Thus anything older than 93 days is long gone and even more-recent data may have been flushed as well. Although Microsoft released a 30-day restore feature but deleted data is gone anyway and in order to find old 30-day data, you need to destroy everything in the last 30 days in order to go back and see the old data!
There are two concerns when it comes to lost, stolen, or corrupted data. The first is on your end. Through human error, you can lose data and if a malicious person in your organization decides to “punish” you, there are lots of ways to destroy your valuable information. Of course, someone can hack your computers and from there destroy data or simply leave a virus or malware that continually wreaks havoc in your system. And, to the extent that someone messes with the programming in a database, you can see all of your important business information turned into garbage.
On the Microsoft end, in the cloud, there could be hardware failures, software failures, power outages, or natural disasters.
The bottom line is that all it takes is for one thing to go wrong in your business or up in the cloud and your data becomes toast. What can you do?
What every business should have for their important information is a complete backup capability and an efficient means of searching for and restoring data. There are companies that specialize in doing these things. At Exigo Business Solutions in the Kansas City area, we partner with three such companies in order to help protect our clients’ critical business information.
These folks are specialists in the data backup and retrieval business. Their system provides cloud-based data backup for both Microsoft Office 365 and for Gmail (which also has backup issues). When you do backups, you are protecting everything you have against loss. But, how do you get it back? An advanced system, like these guys have, gives you effective search tools to find specific bits of data and to comply with things like HIPPA regulations for protecting health-related information.
One of the issues for a growing business is the scalability of their backup solution. Again, these folks not only provide excellent backup protection and recovery options but also full scalability as your data store grows.
When you use SkyKick, your information in Office 365 Groups, OneDrive, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and Exchange Online gets a six-times-a-day backup. They have lots of options for restoring data as well for lists, subsites, Office 365 Groups, OneDrive for Business and mailboxes. They specifically provide the ability to restore a mailbox to a point in time. We find this service and their tools easy to use to protect against inadvertently deleted, corrupted, or lost data.
Datto offers a more comprehensive set of services that include backing up cloud to cloud and providing efficient retrieval options. They will protect you against mistakes by your own employees, malicious acts by disgruntled employees, hackers, or natural disasters on your end. And, if the whole Microsoft system goes blank for a second taking your data with it, they have that covered as well!
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Microsoft 365 is an exceptional suite of software tools that let your employees collaborate from anywhere on the planet. It is an efficient and cost-effective approach to modern business. And, because nothing is ever perfect, you need an alternative solution for backing up and retrieving the data that you work with every day and the old data that remains in the cloud in Office 365.
Did you know that sixty percent of businesses that experience massive data loss are out of business within six months? Don’t let that be you. Contact us today for help making sure that your Office 365 data is properly protected and that you have a system that allows you to efficiently find old, stored data in Office 365.
