Microsoft 365 is the go-to productivity suite for many organisations and in an era of information confidentiality, data protection has never been more important. Protecting your information against corruption and loss is a top priority for Microsoft and these protections are built into the service. To achieve this Microsoft has several solutions to protect your information.
If we focus for a moment on one of the more common Microsoft 365 services, Exchange Online, every mailbox is replicated to geographically separate data centres within the same region. There are some caveats, specifically where a region doesn’t have four data centres, but in all cases, there are four copies of each mailbox across multiple data centres. This provides phenomenal protection against failures in the software, hardware, and data centre layers. This is just one examples of how Microsoft achieve business continuity on behalf of the organisations consuming the service. It is also one of the less visible features which you get for just signing up to the service.
There are other more visible features which you get access to depending on your Microsoft 365 subscription level. To provide an example:
- Data Loss Prevention – identifies, monitors, and protects your sensitive information.
- Exchange Online Protection – email protection against spam, known viruses and malware.
- Advanced Threat Protection – provides extended protection for information held in Microsoft 365 using behavioural analysis and machine learning technology to mitigate malicious content.
- Threat Intelligence – provides interactive tools to assess the prevalence and severity of threats in near real-time, and the capability to remediate threats in suspicious content.
This level of protection is hard to replicate outside of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem and to deliver this level of protection in a traditional on-premises solution would certainly need a significant investment in skills and a big budget. With these protections in place, why do you even need to consider a backup solution for Microsoft 365? The simple answer is because this is one of the features that Microsoft do not provide as part of their solution.
If you accidentally delete an email or file, and quite plausibly that you don’t recognise that it has been deleted until it is permanently deleted from the recycle bin, it’s gone forever. Similarly, another scenario could that a disgruntled employee intentionally deletes information from your Microsoft 365 tenant, possibly going unnoticed, or the individual taking it upon themselves to empty the recycle bin. This could be catastrophic in terms of data loss. This is where a Microsoft 365 backup solution adds value. There are several backup solutions, but typically they enable you to backup the entire Microsoft 365 suite (Email, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams), take multiple backups per day and retain the information indefinitely.
In this age of data confidentiality, integrity, and availability we certainly recommend that Microsoft 365 customers adopt a backup solution to complement the protections provided by the Microsoft platform.
With Matrix IT’s Backup and Disaster Recovery services, you can rest assured that your business is always prepared should the worst happen.
Call us now on 01329 888444 or contact us via email today.
