5 reasons you need a third-party solution to back up Microsoft 365

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. Microsoft 365 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 onus is on you to safeguard your business data. You need a backup and recovery solution that will protect your data wherever it lives—including in the cloud.

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). Beyond these basic settings, litigation hold and/or retention policies can be kept as long as needed, but getting the data back can be time consuming and complex. You need to ensure that your backup service has flexibility and provides simple processes for storing and retrieving data to meet your compliance and business needs. A thirdparty backup service offers greater flexibility, so when you need to restore deleted items to any point in time, you can do so quickly and easily.

Employee productivity matters, and your workers count on alwaysavailable access to their data. When it 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 granularly get data back 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.

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. A recent Ponemon Institute report puts the average cost of a single ransomware attack at $5 million due primarily to productivity loss, system downtime, and information theft. And the attackers are likely after 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 and restore data across your global data footprint—including from and to public clouds.

The last thing busy IT operators 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 even have more remote office/edge locations that need protection. And chances are you still have some critical applications that run on-prem, such as VMware, Oracle, or others. 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 keep your life simpler. No one wants (or has time) to manage a patchwork of solutions.