What would happen if you opened your Outlook, and everything was gone? No email, no contacts, no calendar. For some, this is a nightmare come true. While it is not exactly best practice, many small business professionals live out of their Outlook. Often used as a de facto file management system, rolodex, and scheduling tool. And if all that information stored in Outlook/Microsoft 365 was lost, it could cause serious operational interruption.
Surprisingly, this is not something that most business owners consider a real possibility. Mainly due to the common misconception that Microsoft has backups of customer M365 data. But when you look at your M365 service agreement you will see that Microsoft operates under what is known as a shared responsibility model.
What is the Shared Responsibility Model?
Microsoft is responsible for providing ACCESS to your data. They have multiple data centers with copies of your emails, calendar, contacts, SharePoint and OneDrive data across the world to ensure redundancy. This allows them to continue providing service in the face of disaster, power outage, hardware failures, or cyberattacks. This is should not be considered a replacement for backups.
Control of the data itself (email, contacts, calendar, OneDrive files, etc.) and the responsibility to protect against data loss falls to the customer. You are expected to protect your Microsoft 365 data against, accidental deletion, cyberattack, and malicious actions taken by current or departing employees.
A common question we hear from our partners is “doesn’t Microsoft have a recycle bin? Shouldn’t my deleted items be in there?”
Yes, there is a recycle bin. Yes, your deleted items should be in there if it hasn’t been longer than the preset retention timeframe which is 30 days by default. But what if you didn’t realize it was gone until after 30 days? What if it was maliciously deleted and your recycle bin was intentionally emptied? Without a backup of your Microsoft 365 data, those items are gone for good.
Why small businesses need a backup of Microsoft 365 data
To start, Microsoft themselves state in their services agreement that data owners should regularly backup content and data that is stored on their services.
Additionally, when data is deleted or corrupted, companies face three major problems: Lost data, lost time, and lost profits. Here are just a few of the features that a 3rd party backup solution offers to prevent these problems:
The ability to recover accidentally moved or deleted items from Office 365
- Emails
- Contacts
- Calendar Appointments
- OneDrive Files
- SharePoint Data
- Teams Data
3x per day automated backups of your critical data
Quickly recover from deletion, malware, or other network attacks
If you want to ensure total access and control of your organization’s critical Microsoft 365 data, you need a full data retention solution. We encourage you to reach out to us today to discuss how The Purple Guys can safeguard your SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and Outlook data.
