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Office 365 becomes Microsoft 365 – but is your data any safer?

It has been two years since Office 365 was rebranded as Microsoft 365, but for most subscribers, the service itself is almost the same. This is great for headline productivity and admin continuity – but it also means that the shared responsibility operating model remains the same too.

Under this model, Microsoft is responsible for ensuring application and infrastructure availability to deliver a platform capable of supporting your mission-critical operations. But this also means that your business is wholly responsible for protecting any data stored on the platform.

Indeed, the Microsoft Services Agreement still states:

We recommend that you regularly backup Your Content and Data that you store on the Services or store using Third-Party Apps and Services.

Are we totally on our own?

Microsoft 365 does include some basic data recovery functionality, designed to help first- and second-line tech support agents resolve low-level issues. The platform includes a snapshot recovery mechanism that provides a 30-day roll-back window.

This means that your helpdesk will be able to recover deleted, corrupted or ransomware-infected files quite quickly and easily. However, the 30-day limit is non-negotiable, it cannot be extended natively on the Microsoft 365 platform. This means that if corruption goes unnoticed for 31 days or more, it will be impossible to recover the lost data using the tools supplied by Microsoft.

An unacceptable risk

Clearly, this 30-day window represents an unacceptable risk for highly regulated industries. But in the era of digital transformation – and GDPR – permanent loss of data is similarly undesirable. Losing sensitive information could result in a massive fine that threatens the very future of your business.

Because of its inherent value, your business needs to have the same quality of safeguard in the cloud as you do in your on-premise data centre. This means you will need a proper recovery solution in place that offers granular disaster recovery provisioning – and a 31+ day retention window.

Data in the cloud, backup in the cloud

You rely upon Microsoft 365 to provide flexibility and scalability – so it makes sense to take advantage of the cloud for backup and data recovery too. WTL Secure Cloud Backup offers unlimited data retention as standard and multiple recovery options.

You can restore all of your Microsoft 365 data, including Exchange mailboxes, SharePoint assets and any files stored in OneDrive. Data can be restored directly to Microsoft 365 or exported to any of the popular Office formats (.pst, .msg, .zip etc) for import into another system.

Importantly, WTL Secure Cloud Backup is an air-gapped backup provision. If your Microsoft 365 data is infected or encrypted by ransomware, your air-gapped files cannot be compromised – and you always have a copy that can be recovered whenever it is required.

Microsoft does not have any intention to offer “true” disaster functionality in the 365 platform. Your business will need to identify and deploy a suitable backup solution to plug this mission-critical gap.

To learn more about WTL Secure Cloud Backup and how it will properly secure your Microsoft 365 data,  please get in touch

 

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