Don't Assume That Your Data is Backed Up With Office 365

Many organizations are recognizing the benefits of moving to Office 365. Some benefits include network accessibility anywhere at any time, easy email access both inside and outside of your organization, as well as reducing operations and management overhead. Making the move to Office 365 provides organizations with many benefits like increased end-user productivity to reduced cost and complexity of maintaining on-site hardware. Additionally, Microsoft reduces the risk of downtime substantially by running applications across highly available frameworks spread across different regions. While application downtime is reduced in Office 365, the risk of data loss due to human error is not. Office 365 does provide customers with some protection against loss of data, but the window for data recovery is short and the recovery options limited. Seeking an additional layer of protection against accidental or malicious data loss, organizations have begun to use third-party backup solutions that offer enhanced protection of Office 365 data, which include longer retention periods and more robust recovery options. 

Why Office 365 Backup is Necessary

More often than not, data is deleted and then later realize that it is still needed. While it is possible to recover deleted items from within Exchange Online and OneDrive for Business, the retention for these items is often inadequate. In Exchange Online, individual emails that are deleted by users get moved to the users’ 'Deleted Items' folder. Those items will remain in the 'Deleted Items' folder for the duration set by the administrator (usually 30 days by default). While the 'Deleted Items' folder does provide a layer of protection against end-user errors, messages can be permanently deleted if the user chooses 'Empty Deleted Items' folder. Once items are deleted from the 'Deleted Items' folder, they are then moved to the 'Recoverable Items' folder and into a subfolder named 'Deletions'. The default duration of items in this folder is 14 days, with a maximum duration of 30 days and once an item exceeds the retention setting, the item is gone forever. 

According to Microsoft, the number one cause for data loss is accidental data deletion. About 70% of all lost data is due to either accidental or malicious deletion of data by end-users. While Microsoft does takes several measures to ensure that service availability is not disrupted, the measures taken to ensure that permanent data loss does not occur are limited. Mistakes happen. Users accidentally delete files or a disgruntled employee or hacker takes malicious action in deleting or corrupting data. That is why it is important to have a third party backup solution in place to prevent data loss if you and your organization are using Office 365.