Microsoft Office 365 may be a powerful productivity suite, but there are some gaps when it comes to data protection. If you work hard to gather customer insights data, or if you have valuable proprietary information that needs extra protection, it might be time to look into an Office 365 backup solution.

Reliability and safety are two of the most important factors to think about when moving data to the cloud. Cloud computing may have major advantages over on-premise solutions, but one of its drawbacks is that it’s not 100% reliable. The integrity of your data is Microsoft’s greatest concern. While the platform is highly available, reliable and easy to use, the responsibility for protecting your business data ultimately falls on you, the user. 

Understanding the ‘shared responsibility’ model

The ‘shared responsibility’ model is a term used to describe the understanding Microsoft has with its customers, and clarifies where service ends and where the customer-onus begins. More specifically, Microsoft’s responsibility ends at providing and supporting its applications and servers, while users are responsible for the data within the cloud. This includes endpoints, accounts, access management and customer data.

The critical point being, you store a lot of data in Office 365. Your contacts, your documents, and your calendar are crucial to your day-to-day life. So as a committed Office 365 customer, there’s no reason to keep putting yourself at risk. With the help of a cloud backup solution, you can protect everything that’s most important to you knowing that it’s your responsibility to ensure that.

When backing up Office 365, it’s up to you 

Although Office 365 may seem to have protection and backup built-in, the truth is that users often don’t think about outside protection for their data. It’s a mistake to view geo-redundancy and retention as a backup, when in reality, these features are just meant to be enabled during migration phases. In the end, this misconception could lead to data loss that can’t be restored.

The Microsoft Office 365 cloud service is designed to protect against hardware failures, platform outages, and system malfunctions. However, it is not designed to protect against data loss, which is why taking proactive steps to safeguard data is the responsibility of the business owner or platform user.

Why is it essential to backup Office 365?

No matter how secure a system or network may be, it’s still easy to put your security at risk with simple mistakes. Whether it’s falling victim to phishing attacks, carelessly sharing sensitive data by email, or using unsecure cloud storage, security breaches and data loss can happen to anyone at any time. 

Microsoft Office 365 has a series of useful security features built into it. However, many businesses discover that these features are not as robust as they need, especially when it comes to technological threats. For example, if a company’s data is breached, Office 365 cannot help with restoring organisational data from backups or other sources. Office 365’s data retention capabilities also don’t include built-in notification systems for deleted emails, which can render it impossible to restore these emails without saving them manually on a local device. In addition, it lacks robust measures for securing data against ransomware attacks. 

What this boils down to is that the responsibility for protecting your data cannot be placed squarely on the shoulders of Microsoft. To ensure that your data is safely stored and recoverable, you’ll need to take matters into your own hands.