Why Office 365 Customers Need a Backup Solution
Many business owners using Office 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, the company doesn’t provide users with a comprehensive backup system for their underlying data.
Mechanical malfunctions and physical damage, hacking and theft, user error, and power outages all put user data at risk in the cloud. While companies do their best to prepare for these problems, no plan is foolproof, and stories of data loss are far from rare, with the average data breach costing small businesses $120,000. About 32% of companies get hit by data loss in the cloud, with the most common cause being deletion. Although nearly two-thirds of data loss is accidental, 20% is lost to malicious intent, including hackers.
Cloud Backup Saves Data, Time, and Money
Many business owners using Office 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, the company doesn’t provide users with a comprehensive backup system for their underlying data.
Cloud backup can be the difference between a slight blip and a disaster, and it can offer you a way to mitigate these risks. There was one situation in the U.K. where a customer didn’t think they needed backup besides Office 365. That was until an employee inadvertently deleted 50,000 files in the accounting department’s SharePoint library. The information was recoverable in the recycling bin, but this would have had to have been done file by file, which was going to take an estimated six days. Luckily, this company had been backing up SharePoint files with Cloud Backup. So, the entire folder and all the files were restored within hours — a significant improvement in efficiency.
Ransomware is another issue facing small to medium size businesses across the globe. Although it has become more sophisticated, many schemes are still simple and catch users off guard. With CSI Cloud Backup you would be able to restore all files prior to the attack.
The fact is that having only one copy of important data is asking for trouble, whether it’s stored in the cloud or elsewhere. If your data isn’t backed up, you could be facing not only a loss of productivity as you scramble to rebuild, but also a loss in revenue and reputation.
Office 365 is an excellent service that gives you access to your data from virtually any place at any time — and across many devices. As a software-as-a-service (SaaS) built on the industry-leading Azure public cloud, Office 365 offers users high reliability, geographic redundancy, and secure connectivity.
This should not, however, be confused with a comprehensive data protection solution. Microsoft does not back up Office 365 user data, so they recommend using a third-party solution.
Furthermore, Microsoft doesn’t protect data from common issues like file corruption or everyday human error. Nor does it offer a way to easily revert to older versions if something goes wrong beyond their normal data retention policy.
We can help you in evaluating your options in addressing these shortcomings and specifically discuss how implementing a backup solution can be cost-effective and seamless and offer peace of mind. Please give us a call or send us an email, we would be happy to help.
