Microsoft Exchange backup and recovery

Microsoft Exchange is a messaging and collaboration platform that includes email, calendars, task management, and address book functionality. It’s widely used by enterprises for secure and efficient communication. It can be hosted on-prem or on the cloud (as Exchange Online as a part of Microsoft 365).

Backing up Microsoft Exchange is crucial as it helps safeguard your organization's email communications, calendar data, and contacts from data loss due to accidental deletions, system failures, or cyberattacks. Regular backups ensure business continuity and swift recovery in case of disruptions, protecting valuable information and maintaining organizational productivity.  
 
Using a reliable backup and recovery solution like Cohesity DataProtect helps ensure secure and efficient backups of your Exchange data on-prem or Exchange Online data in the cloud, with easy and fast restoration of individual mailbox objects.

It’s important that you oversee and protect all your enterprise data everywhere it goes—whether your industry is regulated or not.

There are different products in the Office 365 suite. Exchange Online is the hosted version of Microsoft Exchange and one of Office 365’s most popular offerings.

Here are four key reasons your company needs to back up Exchange Online:

1. Cloud data is your responsibility: Exchange Online hosts your data in the cloud, but backing up your data is your enterprise’s responsibility.
2. Limited flexibility for data retention and recovery:  Exchange Online comes with some data retention options, yet its flexibility is limited and some of its advanced options can be hard to use. For example, by default, deleted mailboxes aren’t saved beyond 30 days, and the minimum default retention for deleted items is just 14 days. A modern backup solution will couple policy flexibility with simple processes for storing and retrieving data to meet your evolving compliance and business needs.
3. Workforce expects instant recovery:  Microsoft’s built-in data protection doesn’t guarantee data is retained because it requires employees to change their behaviors, and we all know how hard that is. What’s needed is an Office 365 compatible backup and recovery solution that ensures your IT team can get user mailbox data back quickly to meet and even exceed Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs), while also providing an exceptional user experience that gets employees back to work fast.
4. Email Is a Ransomware Target:  Exchange Online‘s rising popularity makes it an attractive target for ransomware. While the architecture of Office 365 addresses data redundancy and some resiliency, there’s little protection against data loss, accidental or malicious deletion, deletion beyond retention timeframes, corruption, ransomware, and more.

That makes choosing a modern platform capable of fighting back against ransomware—especially attacks against email— extremely important.

For the best level of protection and flexibility for your mission-critical email data, Cohesity DataProtect offers an end-to-end, web-scale backup and recovery solution that gives you easy, granular, instant recovery for your Exchange data on-prem and in the cloud, whenever your business needs it.