Why is it essential for all businesses to have an Office 365 backup solution in place?

There is an assumption amongst many Office 365 users that their data is 100% secure. However, this is not 100% true. Despite the fact that Microsoft can offer a whole host of benefits to businesses in terms of helping to improve their overall productivity, efficiency and collaboration across Office 365, they aren’t able to give users a comprehensive backup system for their data. 

There are a number of things that can happen that could put data at risk in the Cloud such as mechanical malfunctions, hacking, user error, power cuts and much, much more. Despite businesses likely to have a suitable disaster recovery plan in place to deal with these issues, no plan is 100% watertight meaning that data losses can still happen which could bring with it significant financial problems with the average data breach costing SMEs on average £97,000. The statistics back this point up even further by suggesting that over 32% of businesses lose data in the Cloud usually by accidentally deleting it. Although around 67% of data loss is down to user error, that still means that over 20% is lost to hackers and other cybercriminals. 

So, how can a comprehensive cloud backup for Office 365 benefit your business? 

You will often find that a cloud backup can be the main difference between a little bump in the road and a major catastrophe and it gives customers peace of mind on being to mitigate any potential risks to their business. One of our very own customers believed that they didn’t need a backup for Office 365. This soon changed when one of their team accidentally deleted over 50,000 files in the company’s SharePoint library.  

Luckily for them the information was still recoverable from the recycling bin, however, would have had to have been done manually one by one which was likely to take more than 6 days! The good job for them was the fact that Advantage had already been backing up SharePoint files with its cloud backup solution. This meant that a full restoration of the files could be made within a few hours, which saved them a great deal of time and resources. This was the scare that the client needed to then make the decision to back up its whole Office 365 tenant as well. 

Along with the above, ransomware continues to be a significant problem facing SMEs all over the world. Even though the sophistication level has gone through the roof, even the simplest of schemes can catch users out. An example of this was a client of a US based MSP who became the victim of a ransomware attack back in 2016 and the hackers demanded $6,000 to give them back access to their data. However, it was a good job that the MSP had already implemented a full cloud backup months before this incident even occurred. So, no money had to be paid to the hackers or to rebuild the lost files, instead all they had to do was restore all of the customer files to before the hackers took control. 

It goes without saying but just having a single copy of business-critical data is very problematic, regardless of whether or not it's stored in the Cloud or anywhere else. Therefore, if you don’t have your data backed up, you can suffer a significant loss of productivity as well as a loss in revenues and overall brand reputation. 

Without a doubt, Office 365 provides a game changing service that enables you to access your data from any location, from any device at any time. With Office 365 structured on Azure’s cloud, Office 365 can deliver on reliability & connectivity. 

However, at this point it is important to note that it shouldn’t be confused with a comprehensive data protection solution. Also, Microsoft does not provide backups for Office 365 data, doesn’t safeguard data from common issues like corrupt files or user errors nor does it enable you to go back to older versions if there is a problem. Therefore, we would suggest that you consider coming to Advantage for our Cloud Backup for Office 365 solution by contacting our IT team today at Advantage. 

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