M365 Backup: Key Benefits for Businesses
What Is M365 Backup?
Microsoft 365 (M365) Backup can refer to two things:
- The process of creating and managing copies of data stored in Microsoft 365 apps and services, including Exchange Online (emails, calendars, and contacts), SharePoint Online (sites and document libraries), OneDrive for Business (files and folders), and Microsoft Teams (teams, channels, posts, and tabs).
- Native M365 cloud backup solution for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business, as well as the process of creating and managing backups of M365 apps using this solution.
The goal of M365 backup is to protect user data from loss and corruption. For businesses, backup for M365 helps meet compliance requirements and maintain business continuity in case of outages, cyberattacks (like ransomware), software issues, or natural disasters.
Every backup is a data copy, but not every data copy can be considered a backup:
- Backups are typically stored separately from the primary data to avoid a single point of failure.
- Backups are recoverable. You should be able to restore your mailboxes, files, and even Microsoft 365 accounts to the original or custom location.
Why Is M365 Backup Essential for Businesses?
M365 backup is essential because Microsoft does not take responsibility for your data or the impact data loss may have on your business. In addition, cybersecurity regulations mandate businesses to use M365 backup solutions for adequate data protection and management.
Here are the three main reasons why backing up M365 is a must.
Data Security and Protection
Microsoft operates based on the Shared Responsibility Model, which states that users are always accountable for data protection and access management, even in the case of outages.
There are two common misconceptions of Microsoft’s role in protecting your data:
- Due to the built-in replication of its data centers, Microsoft can fail over to another data center in case of an outage or a disaster. However, geo-redundancy cannot be considered a backup since you don’t have access to replicas and, thus, can’t guarantee the recoverability of your data.
- Microsoft native tools for data retention, archiving, and even backup are limited and require significant administration efforts. The main drawback, however, is vendor lock-in. Native M365 cloud backup is only available within the Microsoft infrastructure, so you become highly dependent on Microsoft’s service availability.
Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
Recoverability is another weak point of Microsoft native tools.
- Native retention features have time-limited recovery (within 30-90 days unless you have a retention policy), no point-in-time recovery, and a high risk of permanent data loss.
- Native Microsoft 365 backup is unavailable for Microsoft Teams data and offers a limited M365 backup and recovery functionality. For example, you can’t configure custom retention policies or store backup copies across multiple online and offline locations (as required by data protection best practices and some cybersecurity standards).
- Native recovery options are cumbersome and piecemeal, requiring multiple steps, lacking transparency across applications, and offering limited granular recovery options.
- Native tools do not effectively support data protection best practices, such as the 3-2-1 backup rule, backup encryption, or immutability (which prevents even administrators from modifying or deleting stored data).
The limitations of native tools expose you to the risk of slow, inefficient recovery or even the inability to recover your Microsoft 365 data altogether.
Compliance with Regulations
Data owners must comply with strict compliance requirements for Microsoft 365 data security and management, including backup frequency, backup copy location, and recoverability.
While Microsoft delivers a variety of compliance tools, they mainly work for compliance requests and e-discovery and fall short of fully meeting modern cybersecurity frameworks like NIS2 and NIST.
- Many cybersecurity regulations and standards propose data protection best practices that cannot be fully achieved using native tools alone.
- Regulations like GDPR and NIST require organizations to store backup data copies offline and distribute them across different geographical locations. GDPR mandates organizations to store and process the data of European citizens only within Europe.
How Frequently Should You Perform M365 Backups?
Backup frequency depends on the tool you use.
Native cloud M365 backups don’t allow you to set the backup frequency. Microsoft guarantees the following recovery point objective (RPO):
- OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online: 10 minutes for data within the trailing two weeks and one week for data between 2 and 52 weeks in the past.
- Exchange Online: 10 minutes
Third-party M365 backup solutions enable you to configure backup frequency and rotate recovery points based on your chosen custom retention scheme. In addition to the solution’s capabilities, other factors affect the M365 backup frequency
Factors Affecting Backup Frequency
- Data importance and recovery point objective. The importance of data for your business operations determines the recovery point objective – the maximum acceptable data loss in the case of a cyberattack, outage, or failure.
- User activity and data volume. Higher user activity levels mean more frequent data changes, requiring more frequent backups. On the other hand, larger data volumes impact the backup performance and increase storage costs.
- Compliance requirements. Regulations and industry standards may mandate specific backup intervals to ensure data availability and retention.
Recommended Backup Schedules for M365
There is no one-fits-all approach to backup frequency. Your data volume, RPO goals, budget (storage costs), compliance requirements, and other factors determine the proper intervals.
At NAKIVO, we recommend backing up critical data like Exchange Online mailboxes daily or every 6-8 hours to achieve a tight RPO. NAKIVO M365 backup supports incremental Microsoft 365 backups, meaning that after the initial full backup, the solution identifies and records only the blocks of data that changed since the last backup. You can run daily incremental backups with periodic full backups once a week.
Customizable retention schemes enable you to rotate Microsoft 365 recovery points daily, weekly, and monthly, optimizing storage consumption while preserving critical data.
