Why Microsoft 365 customers need a backup solution
As our ways of working and reliance on technology is evolving, digital collaboration is thriving, but as a result security exposure is increasing.
Many business owners using Microsoft 365 believe that their data is totally secure. The reality, however, is a different story.
Although Microsoft offers many benefits in productivity, efficiency, and collaboration with Office 365, they don’t provide users with a comprehensive backup system for their underlying data. This means if you don’t back up your data, it will be lost permanently after 90 days of deletion when you are using the default retention policy settings.
With the average data breach costing businesses approx £3.03 million and a third of companies being hit by data loss in the cloud each year, primarily by accidental user deletion, it has never been more important to have a licensed external backup solution in place.
There are multiple choices for backing up your M365 data. That said, many of them are complicated to set up, requiring you to pay for their sync software licences separately and in addition to the infrastructure required to store your backup data.
This approach is often accompanied with the headache of complex billing models and ever-increasing costs as your storage usage increases. That’s because customers must often pay a fixed price per user for the sync software and a separate fixed price per GB of high-availability storage required.
This is a significant point because the amount of data you want to backup will inevitably increase over time as your company grows. Depending on your M365 license you could have up to 100GB of email and 5TB (5120 GB) of One Drive data to be backed up per user. In addition to this you could have multiple terabytes of SharePoint data to back up.
These numbers demonstrate the risk of a cost model based on the amount of storage you use and how it could quickly escalate to a very large price per month for your company. A high capital expenditure that is not easy to forecast.
But backing up your data should be all about reducing stress - not increasing it - and that’s why we have worked hard to ensure that our service is one that allows you to “set and forget”. We offer a fixed price per user per month model which includes the sync tools and unlimited storage for backup with no hidden costs. Once configured, our backup service runs silently in the background, protecting your data and ensuring it’s there for you when you need it.
Benefits of cloud backup
- Back up all email in your Exchange Online mailboxes, conversations, and files in Microsoft Teams Public Teams Channels, Group Calendars, Group Notebooks, Group Files, SharePoint Sites, and One Drive for Business.
- Up to six version-controlled backups of your data every day so you can restore with minimal data loss.
- Easy to recover unencrypted versions of your data if you are subject to a ransomware attack.
- Easy to recover maliciously deleted files for eDiscovery or legal hold.
- Backed up data is stored in an encrypted state in highly available Azure Cloud storage.
Top questions we get asked
Q: Doesn’t Microsoft back up my data for me?
A: No. Microsoft clearly state that you are responsible for your data, and their default retention period for deleted content is 90 days before it is unrecoverable.
Q: How can I retain leavers’ data without continuing to pay for their M365 licence?
A: Once a user stops generating new content to be backed up - a leaver for example - you can reassign your M365 and backup licences to a different user to save money. As long as you have at least one active paid subscription with us for the backup service, the leavers data will be held in the backup in its final state. When you need access to it you only need to licence that user for one month of both the backup and M365 services to be able to restore the data and get access to it.
Q: Can you help us restore a business-critical file that someone has deleted in M365?
A: Yes. If the data has been backed up with Claranet Cloud Backup for M365, our service desk will be happy to help you restore any lost data.
Q: What data in M365 can be backed up?
A: All Emails in Exchange, all data in One Drive for Business and SharePoint, conversations and files in Microsoft Teams Public Teams Channels, Group Calendars, Group Notebooks, and Group Files
Q: How can I keep my backup costs simple for budget forecasting?
A: Claranet Cloud Backup is a fixed per user, per month price which includes the backup sync tool and unlimited backup storage. This enables you to easily forecast your costs for using the service.
Related articles

Knock knock: using Azure FrontDoor to accelerate, deliver and protect your web services

Keeping pace with change - How to optimise the user-to-application journey

The cost of cloud

A practitioner's view on the Well-Architected Framework

How to ensure best practice when modernising your cloud environment