5 reasons your business needs a third-party solution to back up Microsoft 365

Here are the top 5 reasons you need a third-party backup solution to keep your data safe and available whenever you need it. 

1. Your enterprise data in the cloud is your responsibility. 

Moving to the cloud offloads the headaches associated with on-premises IT infrastructure management, security, and upgrades. Yet it’s still up to your IT staff to ensure enterprise data can be recovered at all times and brought back quickly when needed. M365 hosts your data in the cloud, but backing it up is your responsibility. Cloud service providers (in this case, Microsoft) focus on service uptime and availability, but as a customer of its cloud service, the job of safeguarding your business data falls to you. You need a backup and recovery solution that will protect your data wherever it lives, including in the cloud. 

2. Native tools provide limited flexibility for data retention and recovery. 

M365’s Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Teams, and Groups come with basic native data retention options, but their flexibility is limited and may not align with your business-level SLAs. For example, deleted email mailboxes are only saved for 30 days (see sidebar for default retention by app). Beyond these basic settings, litigation hold or retention policies can preserve data as long as needed, but getting the data back can be time- consuming and complex. And as of 2026, Microsoft’s Priority Cleanup feature lets administrators bypass retention policies altogether, permanently deleting content before the retention window even expires. You need a backup service with simple processes for storing and retrieving data to meet your compliance and business needs. A third-party backup service also gives you flexibility, so when you need to restore deleted items to any point in time, you can do so quickly and easily. 

3. Your employees expect a rapid response when data is lost or compromised. 

Employee productivity matters, and your workers count on always-available access to their data. When data goes missing, gets deleted, or is infected, they expect your IT team to respond rapidly to restore critical business data. What’s your plan to quickly get SharePoint, OneDrive, and Exchange data back to a last known-good state? What if you need to recover just an individual folder or drive, or a single message from an entire mailbox? Can you find what you need quickly? How long does this take you today? 

Unfortunately, native options may let you down. Here’s what won’t let you down: an enterprise-class backup and recovery solution that ensures your IT team can restore data granularly and quickly so Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) are met or even exceeded. Imagine providing an exceptional user experience so employees can get back to work fast. 

4. M365 data has become a ransomware target. 

If your enterprise relies only on native data protection, you may be out of luck if and when ransomware strikes—and you need to recover at scale. According to Sophos’s State of Ransomware 2026 report, the average cost to recover from a single ransomware attack has climbed to $1.7 million, up 11% year over year, with the total average cost of a breach reaching $5.08 million, driven primarily by productivity loss, system downtime, and information theft. ² Attackers are likely to target your backup snapshots and production data.  

You need a backup and recovery solution that ensures immutability of backup data and responds at scale to ransomware attacks, so you can quickly recover data across your global data footprint—including from and to public clouds. 

The risk isn’t limited to encryption and ransom demands. M365 Copilot now surfaces and indexes content across your organization more broadly than ever, which means ungoverned or unprotected M365 data can end up exposed well beyond its original owner. Cohesity Gaia now integrates with M365 Copilot, giving the agents you build in Copilot Studio access to valuable, protected data without breaking governance.  

After a ransomware attack, the California Department of Finance restored all 2.5 TB of its M365 data—protected by Cohesity on Microsoft Azure—in just 12 hours, and paid no ransom. 

5. Chances are, you have more than just M365 data to protect. 

The last thing busy IT teams need is yet another backup silo to look after. You likely have other SaaS and homegrown cloud applications using cloud infrastructure and platform services that you need to protect. You may also have remote office/edge locations that need protection, and you probably still have critical applications that run on-prem, such as VMware and Oracle.  

To protect all these holistically, you need a modern backup solution that consolidates protection for a wide range of data sources, no matter what they are and where they’re deployed. Ideally, this comes from a single platform, all managed through a single UI, to make your life simpler. No one wants (or has time) to manage a patchwork of solutions.