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The Microsoft 365 suite runs many core business functions for enterprises, often making native retention alone insufficient to protect data in case of a cyber incident. Add to this the myriad other SaaS applications employees use every day that aren’t covered by the native retention policy, and you start to understand why enterprise IT teams need backup solutions for Office 365.
This article compares leading Office 365 backup options, shows what separates a strong backup solution for Office 365 from a lackluster one, and offers a practical way to evaluate vendors before you commit.
Each of the following backup solutions for Office 365 fits a slightly different environment and architecture profile. The best Office 365 backup tool for your business depends on your specific ecosystem, how much control you want to retain vs. using a managed system, and the size of your SaaS footprint.
Best for: Enterprises that need M365 backup managed within a broader hybrid and multi-cloud data protection strategy.
Cohesity’s FortKnox is a good fit for enterprises wanting Microsoft 365 backup alongside broader data protection and cyber resilience. Strengths include unified management, immutable storage, and support for M365 recovery at scale. Limitations mostly revolve around fit and architecture, as Cohesity is strongest for organizations wanting a single platform spanning more than a single backup workload.
Key features:
Best for: Organizations with established Veeam environments wanting proven M365 backup with flexible storage options.
Veeam offers a well-known backup platform with deep expertise in Microsoft workloads and strong recovery options, a natural fit for teams who want a mature backup stack and broad deployment flexibility. The downside for some is that the product mix and administration are more complex as an organization scales.
Best for: Enterprises wanting simplified, policy-driven M365 backup with built-in data classification and ransomware investigation.
Rubrik is well-liked for its clean admin experience and strong cloud-first positioning. Rubrik works well for enterprises wanting simplified policy management, but the tradeoff can be cost and a platform model tending to feel overly heavy compared to point tools. This can make it a bit much for smaller teams with less available bandwidth.
Best for: Large enterprises with strict governance requirements needing M365 backup alongside complex hybrid workload protection.
Commvault is often a top pick for larger enterprises with more complex hybrid estates to manage alongside strict governance needs. A broad and capable tool for these scenarios, this breadth can bring more operational overhead and a longer implementation cycle than some organizations are ready to absorb.
Best for: Microsoft 365-heavy organizations prioritizing collaboration governance alongside backup and recovery.
AvePoint is a frequent choice for Microsoft 365-centric environments, especially where collaboration and governance are top priorities. A good fit for those looking for SaaS-focused protection, buyers should verify if it can stretch far enough outside the Microsoft ecosystem to cover their other application needs.
Best for: Smaller IT teams and managed service providers wanting the simplest possible M365 backup deployment.
N-able’s solution is popular with smaller IT teams and managed service providers wanting the simplest deployment and administration possible. It’s a good practical option, but larger enterprises may need deeper policy controls, identity coverage, and cross-platform SaaS support.
M365 offers native retention and recovery options. This is often the starting point for enterprises with more basic retention needs. Useful in certain scenarios, many teams add third-party backup because the native tools don’t always cover long-term retention, broader SaaS recovery, or the more granular operational controls often needed at scale.
The best Office 365 backup tool does more than store copies of your data. It gives your teams control over recovery flows, secures your files at rest and in transit, and includes support for the rest of your SaaS stack outside of the Microsoft ecosystem. And it does all of this without becoming another tool someone has to babysit when they could be focusing on more mission-critical tasks. As you consider this and other data security solutions, the following are some key points to include in your criteria.
A true enterprise backup solution will cover the Microsoft 365 apps employees use all day, every day. Emails in Outlook, shared files in SharePoint, collaboration workflows in OneDrive, even chat history in Teams. If a product protects only one part of this stack, recovery can get messy fast when a breach, cyberattack, or even a simple misconfigured policy impacts the organization’s workflow.
Granular recovery lets you restore a single mailbox item, file, or conversation instead of rolling back an entire workload, virtual machine (VM), or server volume. This matters because a majority of recoveries are small and one-off, meaning teams need precision when the clock is ticking.
Immutable storage keeps backup copies from being altered or deleted during their retention period. For enterprise teams looking for the best possible cybersecurity resilience services, this is key since one of the first places attackers target is backup systems. With immutable storage, your backup files are safe from ransomware, along with other cyberattacks.
Identity must be part of a modern backup and recovery, thanks to the importance of access control in keeping critical data assets protected. If your backup strategy doesn’t include Entra ID, restoring the content may not be enough because access permissions and admin controls may remain broken.
Many enterprise SaaS stacks extend far beyond Microsoft 365 to include Salesforce, Slack, Jira, Google Workspace, and more. A strong backup platform will protect more than a single app family, cutting tool sprawl and making recovery policies easier to manage.
A solid evaluation process of data backup and recovery services starts with your business problem, not the product demo. When conducting your own office 365 backup solutions comparison, your team should take into account factors like your organization’s size, compliance pressures, recovery expectations (recovery time objective, RTO, and recovery point objective, or RPO), and how much of your infrastructure you want covered by a unified management model.
Here are three top evaluation criteria to get you started:
Total cost of ownership (TCO): A cheap subscription can become expensive fast if it requires add-ons to do what you need it to do, takes more admin time than expected, or needs third-party tools to cover identity, SaaS, or on-prem workloads.
Vendor lock-in: The more data and workflows you have bound to a single product, the harder it can become to switch as needs evolve or as your organization scales.
Scalability: Ask about what happens when user count, data volume, retention windows, and restore requests all go up simultaneously.
The proof of concept (POC) is when you can expect concrete answers to your pressing questions, rather than relying on marketing materials or sales scripts, in your hunt for the best backup solutions for Office 365. The goal is to see how each platform will behave under the conditions your team faces every day.
A question set to get you started:
Cohesity gives enterprise teams Microsoft 365 backup and recovery within a broader data resilience strategy, so they can manage SaaS protection alongside other backup and recovery workflows. This gives you a single platform with unified management of your Microsoft 365 backups, immutable storage, and recovery workflows integrated with the rest of your backup environment.
Cohesity supports granular recovery for the everyday workloads teams depend on, including collaboration and email data, adding the kind of protection enterprises expect from a modern data resilience solution. If your backup needs span on-premises systems along with cloud-based workloads, explore more to see how Cohesity can reduce the number of places your team has to check, update, and defend.
