Backup for Microsoft Office 365

Even though it is stored in the cloud, SaaS data is as vulnerable to data loss as virtual and physical workloads. To meet your organization’s recovery time objective (RTO), it is important to back up the frequent changes within Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint Online data in Microsoft 365 while saving backup storage space. Microsoft 365 backups in NAKIVO Backup & Replication are incremental by default with only changed data being sent to the backup repository. The solution stores Microsoft 365 data in local storage for accessibility and immediate recovery.

To meet your organization’s recovery point objective (RPO) for Microsoft 365 data, create a retention policy to determine how frequently data should be backed up. You should also define a backup rotation scheme to retain only the recovery points you need. By defining a backup rotation scheme, you maintain the lifecycle of these recovery points and save storage space as expired recovery points are replaced with newer ones. After each incremental Microsoft 365 data backup, a recovery point is created representing a version of your data at a specific point in time. With up to 4,000 recovery points per Microsoft 365 backup in NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the points can be rotated daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly using the grandfather-father-son (GFS) scheme.

Given that backup data should be available at a moment’s notice for financial reporting, e-discovery, and other regulatory requirements for data availability, retention, and recovery, perform regular granular recoveries of Microsoft 365 items. The solution delivers advanced search capabilities to help you easily find and recover Microsoft 365 items and meet reporting requirements or fulfill e-discovery requests. To verify that Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, or SharePoint Online items can be instantly recovered after accidental or intentional data deletions, plan regular test restores of emails, contacts, calendar events, folders, files, lists, list items, document libraries, and sites. NAKIVO Backup & Replication for Microsoft Office 365 allows you to recover items directly from backups to the original or a different location.

Implement security measures to avoid breaches to your backup data and maintain regulatory compliance. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you can configure two-factor authentication (2FA) to prevent unauthorized access to backup data and apply the principle of least privilege with role-based access control (RBAC).

Protect Microsoft 365 backups from ransomware by keeping them disconnected from your networks. By retaining multiple recovery points for point-in-time restores and creating an “air-gap”, you can ensure that you have a clean copy of Microsoft 365 data to recover from after a ransomware attack.

After deleting the Microsoft Office 365 user account of an employee who has left your organization, Microsoft only stores the data associated with that account for 30 days before deleting it. However, your organization may need to access a former employee’s data in the future for regulatory compliance purposes or to fulfill legal requests for information. Use Backup for Microsoft Office 365 to regularly back up mailboxes, OneDrive data and sites, thereby ensuring that you can recover your data when you need to, whatever the employee’s status. If an employee does leave the company for any reason, you will have a copy of their Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online data, including emails and files, that you can access whenever you need. Moreover, with NAKIVO Backup & Replication, you get granular recovery, allowing you to restore document libraries, lists, folders, files, contacts, calendar items and emails. Search and browse the backup versions and recover only the items you are looking for.

Microsoft Office 365 imposes limits on mailbox size depending on the plan. Additional shared mailboxes and archive mailboxes consume additional storage. Nevertheless, with large volumes of data, mailboxes are bound to use up all the available space eventually. This may lead employees to delete emails to free up space. This deleted data is not recoverable in Microsoft Office 365 after a limited time period. To address this problem, back up Office 365 mailboxes for long-term storage and future restoration. This serves two purposes. First, backups ensure that Microsoft Office 365 data is protected against accidental deletion, ransomware attacks and insider threats. Secondly, users can delete emails from the user mailbox to clear space, safe in the knowledge that secure backups exist. If the need for old emails suddenly arises, employees can rapidly restore the necessary data. Office 365 email backups can be stored indefinitely, guaranteeing that your data is available whenever it is needed.

Businesses retain data for regulatory compliance and for potential legal proceedings. Most data protection laws focus on transparent consumer data use and financial reporting and stipulate how long data should be stored. Microsoft Office 365 addresses legal compliance with the native Litigation Hold feature, which freezes mailboxes to prevent deletion. However, if a regulatory body or court requests previously deleted data, Microsoft Office 365 offers no functionality to protect a business from penalties. The best way to ensure compliance with laws and regulations is to back up Office 365 data with NAKIVO Backup & Replication. Store these backups onsite or offsite according to local legislation.

Accidental deletions, rogue administrators and external threats expose data to loss, theft and ransomware attacks. These unwanted risks and threats can lead to operational disruptions and reputational losses for businesses. While the loss of personal data can irrevocably weaken customer trust, Microsoft Office 365 offers limited functions to address these issues. By backing up Microsoft Office 365 data, you build an effective disaster recovery plan and ensure business continuity. Create multiple backups stored on different devices to establish resiliency. Then, if data loss occurs, rapidly restore entire mailbox folders or individual objects directly back to the source. You can also mitigate the risk of rogue administrators by configuring role-based access control (RBAC) to limit users’ access.

Migrating from an on-premises Exchange Server setup to a hybrid or purely cloud Exchange Online deployment offers businesses greater operational efficiency. But it also poses significant data loss risks. Migrations are multistage processes in which administrators must carefully track the status of every user and mailbox. Any mistake or disruption exposes businesses to losing critical business data. Use NAKIVO Backup for Microsoft Office 365 to establish fail-safe mechanisms during migrations. NAKIVO Backup & Replication supports backups for Exchange Online mailboxes and machines running Exchange Server. If at any point, during or after the migration, administrators learn that data has been lost in the process, they can rapidly restore the items from the backups. Once the migration has been completed, repurpose the backups to ensure regulatory compliance and protect against security threats.

Large corporations can delegate Microsoft Office 365 backup and recovery to specific branches or business units. With the multi-tenancy functionality in NAKIVO Backup & Replication, this scenario can be implemented successfully by using the multi-tenant setup to create isolated environments (tenants) within a single software deployment. This setup simplifies data protection management for tenants and offers centralized control and visibility for administrators. Offloading some of the routine data protection activities helps maintain flexibility and short recovery times. The role-based access controls (RBAC) feature allows administrators to assign specific roles to tenants.

With ransomware attacks growing in scale and frequency, thereby crippling businesses and governmental organizations, it’s essential to protect your cloud assets. Don’t let cybercriminals lock you out of access to your Microsoft Office 365 data. Use NAKIVO Backup & Replication to create local backups for Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online data. By storing your backups locally, you can restore your Microsoft 365 data without paying the ransom if it’s locked or encrypted by ransomware. It is hard to overestimate the importance of having a locally-stored backup since the average cost of a ransom exceeds $200,000. With instant recovery of items, you can quickly resume your operations and leave the cybercriminals empty-handed.

Microsoft Office 365 offers high-quality SaaS for business collaboration and productivity. But no matter how much you enjoy using Microsoft Office 365, you might want to have full control of your data residing in the cloud by storing it locally. To ensure you have access to your data at any time, you can back up your Office 365 data to local storage in your data center. NAKIVO Backup & Replication seamlessly backs up Microsoft Office 365 data and makes it available through an intuitive interface. Thus, you can conduct your business knowing that no company has disproportionate control over your cloud data.