Office 365 has almost become the de facto standard for corporate email. It provides a highly resilient cloud platform that enables your end-users to access their email on any device in any location and has taken away the need for you to manage and maintain corporate mailboxes within your on-premises environment.
With highly sophisticated geo-redundancy, you have the peace of mind that the service is always available and with mailboxes and SharePoint documents held within the cloud, you do not have to worry about information being kept on local devices. However, resilience of the platform should not be confused with protecting your data. O365 does not back-up your mailboxes or documents; this is your responsibility and, in many cases, a significant risk.
What are the risks?
The obvious risk is that we accidently delete things; we have all been there – whether we are just trying to be organised and clean-up your mailbox or simply overzealous with the delete key. Although we do have a safety net of our deleted folder and Microsoft gives us a 14-day grace period to recover items, after this, it is a case of when it’s gone, it’s gone.
The risk is not only accidental deletion. If you remove a user from your O365 account, unless you archive their mailbox, the content is removed with the user. You are also at risk from internal malicious activity, whether that be an employee who intentionally deletes items to either cover-up a trail or as a parting gesture. O365 is also susceptible to ever-increasing cyber-attacks; malware and ransomware can quickly render a mailbox inaccessible and a key goal of phishing attacks is to gain control of an end-user’s email account.
Ensuring Business Continuity & Compliance
To ensure business continuity requires for the business-critical data held within your O365 mailboxes and SharePoint to be secure and meticulously backed-up. Just take a step back and consider the disruption to the business that would be caused by losing this data.
Compliance is also a key consideration. Most organisations have a retention policy in place for correspondence and transactional data either as part of their best practice or as regulatory compliance requirements. Unless this is controlled centrally through a rigid back-up regime, then gaps will inevitably happen and be exposed in any data audits.
Backing-up O365 is Not Complex, Nor Expensive
Addressing this risk is neither complex nor expensive. NAK offers a fully managed O365 back-up service where we leverage industry-leading Veeam technology to meticulously back-up your end-user mailboxes and SharePoint content in line with your retention requirements.
Leveraging the standard O365 APIs we are able to take full and snapshot back-ups of your environment and securely retain this within MS Azure, AWS, our private cloud, or leverage your existing on-premise storage capacity.
Delivered as-a-Service, we work with you to understand the business continuity needs of your business to define and deliver against stringent SLAs for Recover Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). The process is fully documented, tracked and auditable with processes in place to regularly test the integrity and recoverability of your back-ups.
The service is charged on a per mailbox basis making the cost predictable with no surprises; we also provide you with the option to back-up your SharePoint based on the size of your instance. The value you gain is to significantly reduce the risk to business continuity and ensure you are fully compliant to your data retention requirements.
If you would like to discuss this further and explore the options we provide for O365 back-up or other cloud back-up services we provide, we would love to talk to you. Simply reach out to us on 0300 456 0471 or email us at enquiries@nak.co.uk.
