Microsoft 365 Backup Strategy Foundations
What Is a Microsoft 365 Backup Strategy?
A Microsoft 365 backup strategy is a comprehensive plan designed to prevent or minimize Microsoft 365 data corruption and loss due to cyberattacks, hardware or software failures, other outages, and disasters. The strategy ensures a backup copy of your data is readily available for a quick recovery, minimizing downtime and disruption to your business operations.
Each organization’s backup strategy is unique and influenced by factors such as industry, company size, available resources, risk exposure, and operational resilience requirements. A well-crafted strategy typically includes risk analysis, IT asset management, backup objectives, methods and procedures, retention schemes, storage management, incident response plans, and testing.
What are the Critical Benefits of Implementing a Microsoft 365 Backup Strategy?
Data Security
A robust backup strategy significantly enhances your organization’s ability to survive in the ever-evolving cyber threat landscape.
Contrary to popular belief, Microsoft is not responsible for data protection or loss your organization or customers may face due to outages or disruptions of Microsoft services. Microsoft even recommends backing up all your Microsoft 365 data to avoid loss.
NOTE: Microsoft 365’s native tools do not provide the necessary functionality to guarantee data security and rapid recovery. These tools are often complex, require manual administration, and offer insufficient ransomware protection. Therefore, most organizations opt for third-party software like NAKIVO Backup for Microsoft 365.
Business Continuity
Even an hour of unplanned outage can cost industrial businesses $125,000, not to mention the reputational risks. Implementing proper backup and recovery policies in Microsoft 365 ensures quick and seamless recovery, allowing you to resume business operations promptly in the event of a disaster or system failure.
Compliance
Regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, NIS2, and DORA mandate high operational resilience, and non-compliance can lead to fines amounting to millions. Even if your organization isn’t subject to these regulations, you may need to retain data for legal cases and e-discovery requests.
NOTE: While Microsoft 365 has retention tools like eDiscovery and Litigation Hold, they often require a lot of manual effort, resulting in human errors and data loss.
How Is a Backup Policy Set Up in Microsoft 365?
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach; each organization must create a backup strategy that suits its specific needs. However, here are the most critical aspects to consider.
1. Assess potential risks
Start with the risk assessment and business impact analysis to understand your organization’s vulnerabilities and potential risks. These may include malicious activity, human errors, outages, and failures. A comprehensive Office 365 data protection policy should outline different scenarios to address various risk types.
2. Determine the scope
Identify your assets and determine their importance to the business. Document all Microsoft 365 apps and services where you store data and prioritize them (for example, you can classify them as critical, mission-critical, important, important for performance, etc.).
Typically, the apps and data to include in a Microsoft 365 backup policy are:
- Exchange Online mailboxes, emails, attachments, calendars and contacts
- OneDrive for Business files, documents including the version history, media
- SharePoint Online sites, libraries and lists
- Microsoft Teams conversations, media files, channels, notes
3. Set recovery objectives
Determine recovery objectives for each asset based on the data criticality and update frequency:
- Recovery point objective – the maximum amount of data that you can lose. The more critical and dynamic the data is, the lower the RPO you need to set for it.
- Recovery time objective – the maximum downtime your organization can tolerate. For critical Microsoft 365 apps and services, the RTO value is in seconds, whereas for non-critical ones, it can range from hours to days.
Priority and recovery objectives dictate the frequency of backups and their availability for recovery. For example, storing mailbox content on tape detached from the network may save data from cyberattacks but is unlikely to help you recover data in seconds when the need arises. This brings us to the next aspect of the strategy.
4. Diversify backup storage
Storage tiering helps you align with your goals while also optimizing storage capacity and management. One of the Office 365 security best practices is aligning your strategy with the 3-2-1 rule to maximize data resilience. According to this rule, you need to have at least 3 data copies stored in two offsite and one cloud location, ensuring you always have a backup copy to recover from. You can enhance the strategy even more by adding at least one immutable and one air-gapped backup copy for more reliable protection against ransomware.
Different storage types also affect the recovery time. As we mentioned before, you may back up data of deleted Microsoft 365 users and store it offsite on detachable devices. However, recovery in this case may take longer than recovery from local storage. On the other hand, local storage, while ensuring faster recovery, can be less secure than an offline storage device. You should base your decision on available storage types, budget constraints, data priority, and recovery objectives.
NOTE: A good alternative for Microsoft 365 backup storage is another cloud outside the Microsoft 365 infrastructure. However, not all solutions allow direct Microsoft 365 backup to the cloud or offsite devices like NAS and deduplication appliances. NAKIVO Backup & Replication supports a wide range of storage destinations for Microsoft 365.
5. Configure backup schedules and retention
Organizations may need to back up critical data daily or even more frequently, quickly consuming storage space. For this reason, a good Microsoft 365 backup and recovery policy should include backup schedules for various apps and recovery point rotation schemes to optimize storage space without losing important data.
One of the most commonly used rotation schemes is the Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS). This multi-level scheme incorporates various backup types to enhance data resilience:
- A full backup performed at the longest intervals (a month or more).
- A differential or incremental backup performed at more frequent intervals (for example, weekly)
- An incremental backup performed as frequently as possible (daily or even hourly when needed)
Managing backups for hundreds or thousands of Microsoft 365 users and the variety of apps they use can quickly overwhelm administrators, leading us to the next point.
6. Automate backup tasks
Human errors are a common cause of data loss, and implementing backup automation protocols can help minimize their occurrence. Protocols may include automated backup sequences, schedules, post-backup alerts, data protection policies, built-in retention settings, and more.
NOTE: Native Microsoft 365 tools are not only complex but also offer limited automation capabilities, resulting in more manual work for admins. It’s important to choose a third-party backup solution that can alleviate admins’ routine tasks and reduce human errors.
7. Create an incident response plan
Set recovery priorities for different Microsoft 365 apps based on the recovery objectives. Detail recovery protocols to ensure administrators know precisely what, how, when, and where to recover data in various incident scenarios. The backup solution should support multiple recovery types, including full account recovery and point-in-time granular recovery of files and app objects such as emails, attachments, Teams channels, SharePoint Online sites, and more.
8. Consider security enhancements
The backup strategy shouldn’t focus solely on backup but establish a comprehensive data protection framework. This entails security protocols for access management, encryption, real-time threat monitoring, and more.
9. Review strategy effectiveness
Regardless of how advanced your strategy is, regular review, testing, and updates of procedures and protocols are necessary to ensure effectiveness against evolving digital risks.
Recent EU acts like NIS2 and DORA introduce management accountability for incidents and data loss. This means that business continuity, including the backup strategy, is no longer solely the concern of an IT department. Collaboration with management is essential to ensure that the backup strategy aligns with the needs of all business units. Moreover, management involvement can help raise personnel awareness of threats and improve cyber hygiene across the organization.
How NAKIVO Enhances Microsoft 365 Backup Strategies
NAKIVO Backup & Replication is a robust data protection solution that brings all your data protection to one place. Along with virtual, cloud and physical workloads, the solution supports Microsoft 365 apps and services as well as cloud-to-cloud backups. The solution’s reach functionality, including automated disaster recovery capabilities, make it a perfect choice for backup strategies of any complexity.
