You can watch our short video below summarising the blog. It’s all about keeping your Office 365 data safe!
Did you know Microsoft doesn’t backup your Office 365 data?
As unbelievable as it sounds, its true! Microsoft don’t backup your Office 365 data. Instead what they do is they replicate your data in the cloud as a redundancy feature, which helps them to comply with data retention policies. What this means is that that can make sure your data is always available in its current state. But it’s not backed up! If the original is altered or corrupted, then the replicated file will be too!
And if you’re solely relying on Office 365 features such as Legal Hold or Archiving, restoring a single (depending on the size of the file of course) can potentially take up to 6 hours. This is due to how it exports and re-imports PST files. Now imagine if you had had to restore many files or even entire accounts. This could be a ridiculous amount of time. In this time, you have the potential to lose customers as well as wasting a lot of time/productivity. However, if you were to recover with a backup already in place, that one file could take only around 5 minutes (again size dependant). I think we all agree that is a much preferable time frame!
(Survey by us, asking about who uses Office 365).
Why Do I Need a Backup?
We often hear “It’ll never happen to me” as a lot of people believe data loss is down to hackers or virus attacks. You may be surprised to hear that in fact around 75% of data loss is caused by accidental or intentional deletion (IT Compliance Policy Group). One of the biggest risks to your data that you can’t anticipate or prepare for is human error. Accidents happen. And that’s fine, there isn’t much you can do about avoiding them. What you can do however, is to have the appropriate measures in place to easily recover from them. A survey conducted by SkyKick stated that 62% of companies asked had suffered data loss due to user error. With hackers and third party software only accounting for a combined 20%.
Is the Cost Worth it?
The cost to restore a single lost file has been estimated to be equal to or more than investing in an organisation-wide backup solution for an entire year. Think about if you needed to backup more.
Not just a file or folder but a whole database. Think about the monetary and time loss. Would waiting a long timefor a file to be restored affect your business’ productivity? The cost of not having a backup solution can be very unpredictable. When weighing up the cost of having backup vs not having it, consider this:
Would you rather have a constant, low cost that meant you were protected no matter what or potentially a huge cost without warning? Like mentioned earlier it’s unpredictable and so you could result in spending hardly anything, but you could also end up spending a small fortune.
“the average predictable cost of data loss to a small business is £3936” – Skykick
A lot of people and companies who have experience with backups and data loss will tell you that it’s not a matter of “if” but “when”. Having a backup in place dramatically reduces the risk of crippling aftereffects post-data loss.
Backup maybe a constant cost, and in an ideal world you’d never have to use it. Seems silly right? Not if you do end up using it. Can your business manage losing almost £4000 if the average is to be believed? Plus, backup nowadays is usually fairly cheap and is usually always useful at some point – “when”, not “if”.
What We Recommend…
We recommend that you seriously think about whether a service that backs up your Office 365 data would be beneficial for you and your business.
If you have any questions you can always get in contact with us and we’ll do our absolute best to help you in any way we can.
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