In our conversations with customers when asked about their backup strategy for Office 365 a surprising amount of times they are under the impression that Microsoft backs up the environment as part of the service, however that is not the case, an extract from the service description is below:
Office 365 offers basic protection to deal with some of the things that could damage your data, but there are many things it doesn’t protect you from, including malicious actions from external and internal parties, for example hackers accessing and deleting files or disgruntled employees on their way out of the business wiping all their data and mail.
Whilst versioning is available in Onedrive and Sharepoint and can be used to roll back unwanted changes or mistakes, it will not provide protection from an individual taking actions explicitly intended to cause harm. If the individual has admin privileges (either authorised or unauthorised) it presents an even bigger risk. If the thought of hackers getting access to an account with Administrator credentials seems a very small risk, just reference what happened at Twitter recently when hackers got access to administrator credentials. Whilst the impact of that was extremely visible, in another circumstance a lot more damage could have been done before the company as aware.
The best way to protect your Office 365 environment is with a 3rd party offering. There are various options available, however at the base level we always subscribe to the traditional 3-2-1 rule: Three copies of your data on two different pieces of media, one of which should be offsite. There is an option of using Office 365 to protect itself, however this doesn’t meet the 3-2-1 rule, it’s like backing up your files to another slice on your local hard drive. If you would like to discuss the various options which do meet the 3-2-1 rule and what the best solution is for your business please don’t hesitate to get in touch today.