INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Cloud
Ensuring your Office 365
environment is protected
With cloud technology
becoming more popular
among technology leaders,
it is easy for data to get lost
among the hype. Michael
Gogos, Product Manager,
Quest Data Protection, offers
some top tips to protecting
Office 365 environments
and bolstering backup and
recovery processes.
As more organisations leverage
cloud to collaborate and ensure
Business Continuity and productivity,
Microsoft 365, particularly, is gaining
traction as the productivity platform of
choice. Organisations and users therefore
need to feel confident their systems and
data are protected in this environment.
While Microsoft Office 365 offers a number
of system availability and data protection
capabilities, data can still be damaged or lost
based on several unforeseen situations.
Here are some tips to bolster Office 365
backup and recovery processes:
Take control
SaaS applications, and the cloud in general,
is just as susceptible to outages and recovery
challenges as traditional on-premises data
centres. This includes infrastructure failures or
accidental mistakes, to purposeful malicious
attacks. To help mitigate, IT teams should
perform their own Office 365 backups.
Maintain multiple copies of your backups
on different devices and locations as this is
one of your best defences against malicious
attacks. Performing your own Office 365
backup allows the business to restore
business-critical data to another location or
system, including an on-premises resource.
This makes it easier to help reduce the risk
of business downtime, keeps productivity incheck
and protects your brand.
Familiarise yourself with
retention policies
Office 365 offers retention policies but be sure
to read the fine print. Not all are considered
long-term data retention required by various
compliance regulations. Also, retention
policies don’t protect data that is accidentally
or maliciously changed. To bolster your
Office 365 backup and recovery footprint,
turn to third-party solutions that support a
3-2-1 backup strategy – one that allows the
business to have multiple copies of data on
separate devices and in different locations.
This will give you the protection you need
and the ability to recover changed, damaged
or deleted files or data. Additionally, there
is no limit to how long you choose to retain
your data, making it easier to meet necessary
compliance requirements.
Don’t use data availability groups for
individual mailbox backup and restore
Every mailbox database in Office 365 is
hosted in a database availability group
(DAG) and replicated to geographically
dispersed data centres within region.
Although every mailbox database has four
copies, one of these copies is configured
as a lagged copy, making it vulnerable to
human error or malicious attacks. Find a
solution that gives IT teams a granular level
view of recovery options that provides them
with the power to restore data – such as
entire mailbox, individual emails and email
attachments – when and where they want.
Understand the value of your
Office 365 data
Often, it is not only the files or emails that
are important, but also the context and
connections these emails and files have to
other data. This is where the true business
value in Office 365 comes from. Consider
Microsoft Teams, which has quickly become
one of the most popular productivity
and connectivity applications used by
organisations. Teams allows co-workers
to share and collaborate on documents
and wikis and communicate across chat
and video meetings. Protecting just the
individual documents or chat records
without the surrounding context of the
team structure, connections and history,
means that the business value of that
context is unprotected. •
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