Microsoft 365 is a reliable Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that has gained immense popularity in recent times with remote work culture getting adopted by all the businesses and organizations.
As per Microsoft’s Shared Responsibility Model, Microsoft focuses predominantly on application uptime and the underlying infrastructure (Hardware/Software failures and Power outages). It’s still your responsibility to protect your business data as there are numerous threats to which M365 data can be exposed to.
Let’s discuss some of the top vulnerabilities to which the critical data might fall prey.
Accidental Deletion
This is an absolutely unavoidable case while discussing the Microsoft 365 data. Regular and consistent use of Office 365 productivity tools across the organization creates loopholes for such inevitable human errors.
Retention Policy
The gap between the length of time the organization wants its data to be retained and what M365 offers is a necessary point of discussion. There are a lot of time limitations for the M365 retention feature. A proper backup with advanced retention policies is required to create time stamps to which the admin can roll back when the necessity arises.
Legal and Compliance requirements
This case plays hand in hand with the retention gaps many organizations encounter. Businesses adhering to many data compliance policies are bound to retain data for a specific period of time.
Internal Security Threats
The internal threat is overseen by many organizations. It is important to fact-check multiple cases which have been registered for data purging, corrupting, and other malicious attacks done by internal members of the organization. A good example is a departing employee performing forceful email purging.
External Security Threats
Cyber attacks and ransomware attacks were happening and will keep happening. The intruders find some way or other to get into your businesses. It is obvious to use a wide variety of applications for different reasons for your businesses. As these applications reside in your environment, they act as a nested host to certain malware attacks.
Data Migration
This case is an advantage of having a proper backup setup. Scaling up of infrastructure is a necessary action that gets to be performed be it any business big or small. Having a backup tool which will enable you to choose the required time stamps and restore the data to the target will help you with easy migration.
The security feature from the SaaS provider is often misunderstood for data protection. Their work is to only provide and maintain a highly available platform for their clients. Thus, coming to the point on how much necessary it is to backup your Microsoft 365 data.
A recent survey shows the following;
- 3% of M365 users do not backup their data
- 68% of M365 users make use of the inbuilt backup capabilities
- 27% use a 3rd party backup tool
The majority of Office 365 users rely upon the inbuilt backup features as the survey reports. Let me put on a few M365 features to light and discuss its limitations as well, so you as readers can get a much clearer picture of why an efficient backup tool is necessary apart from the inbuilt options.
The version history of SharePoint is a popular feature many IT admins use. Also, it is end-user accessible. Meaning, that not just the IT admin but also the end-user can enable the version history feature to roll back to old versions. Every time a change is detected, it gets stored as a separate version which can be browsed by the end users and also be reverted back to when needed.
The limitations are as follows;
- It only works for SharePoint
- It only works if it is enabled for the document library
- Only a limited number of versions can be held
- It does not work if the files are deleted
Microsoft 365 Exchange’s deleted item retention is another feature its users depend on. This allows end-users to perform the Undo Delete action. This feature is again limited to time constraints as the undo delete action can be performed for the files deleted a couple of weeks ago but cannot for the files deleted a few months back.
The same limitation applies to SharePoint’s recycle bin as well.
Many IT Admins make use of the retention policy feature. Once this feature is enabled, when a file is deleted by the end-user, it disappears from the end user’s visibility but the deleted file still remains in the system. Upon need, the admins can retrieve this deleted data. This is often misunderstood to help them prevent data loss.
What users forget is that a separate copy or version is stored alongside of the live data and not as a separate copy somewhere else as the user would with a backup tool.
Prevention lock can be a good feature that will not allow even the IT admin to delete or overwrite the data. But this feature is against many compliance policies and also comes with a limitation that it cannot be disabled for a particular time period once it is enabled.
While I have listed out almost all the possible reasons for you to host a reliable backup software, here’s the last and most important of all. The Microsoft service agreement states – “We strive to keep the Services up and running; however, all online services suffer occasional disruption and outages, and Microsoft is not liable for disruption or loss you may suffer as a result.
In the event of an outage, you may not be able to retrieve the Content or Data that you’ve stored.
We recommend that you regularly backup your Content and Data that you store on the services or store using Third-Party Apps and Services”.
Thus, encouraging all the readers and Microsoft 365 users to deploy reliable backup software.
BDRSuite is a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery solution designed to protect the data across diverse IT environments that include virtual (VMware, Hyper-V), physical (Windows, Linux, Mac), cloud workloads (AWS, Azure), and SaaS applications (Microsoft 365, Google Workspace).
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