In terms of your Office 365 SaaS data security – ask yourself
“How much do I value my business data?”
Your answer is likely to be that you value your data very highly as it is the backbone of your business structure.
Office 365 SaaS – comes with backup as standard? Right?
The simple answer to that is ‘Yes’ but is your email, SharePoint and One Drive backed up in a way that protects your business activity in the best way for you?
Ask yourself this Office 365 SaaS email back up related question
What would happen if someone deleted all their emails just before leaving your building for the very last time?
FACT
Over 70% of data loss in cloud applications is due to accidental or malicious deletion by end users.
We now know therefore that employees leaving the company is another great example of why deploying an addition back up for your Office 365 mailboxes is a good idea.
It is usually more cost effective to maintain the email account of a ‘leaver’ in backup as provided by QiOffice 365 SaaS Protect, than paying for maintaining the mailbox of a member of staff who has moved on.
Office 365 SaaS Mailbox Peace of Mind with additional backup
When someone moves on whether it be on good terms or under a cloud their mailbox can be immediately deactivate whilst leaving you with a full back up of their email exchanges.
Is enhancing your backup of Office 365 SaaS necessary?
There’s a common misconception among SaaS users that backup isn’t necessary for their data because it exists in the cloud. And by data we include SharePoint and One Drive data in this instance.
SaaS applications can be as equally vulnerable to data loss as on-premise apps. This is not necessarily because of cyber-criminal activity.
Even Microsoft make recommendations in their SLA for third party back up.
See the Service Availability section in the Microsoft published SLA
So, what is the major cause?
Because, as we now know – the main cause of data loss is human error.
People are human, they delete stuff – usually in error but sometimes because they have something to hide or wish to make life difficult for a soon to be ex-colleague.
“With something like 85 percent of a company’s intellectual property flowing through Outlook, it’s important for us to be able to provide the same backup potential that we could elsewhere in the cloud.” – Frank M. DeBenedetto, Two River Technology Group
Office 365 Data loss and reasons for back up in summary:
The most common scenarios for losing Office 365 data:
- Malicious deletion by a disgruntled employee or outside entity
- Malware damage or ransomware attacks
- Operational errors such as accidental data overwrites
- Lost data due to cancelled app licenses
What backup is included in your Office 365 SaaS subscription?
Microsoft undertake to protect you from
- Hardware Failure
- Software Failure
- Natural Disaster
- Power Outage
But do not assure assistance against
- Human Error
- Programmatic Errors
- Malicious Insiders
- External Hackers
- Viruses and Malware
The Microsoft NATIVE tools will enable you to restore data in most instances, but it will not be instant. You can be waiting for several weeks.
SharePoint and One Drive backup
When data is restored it may not be in the files or folders it was structured in originally and this will likely result in you using your support company for some assistance which will be chargeable if they have already strongly suggested that you should back up your Office 365 data.
Office 365 SaaS Emails backup
Litigation hold or storing emails in Shared Mailboxes are two common shortcuts to backing up data in Office 365. However, these options do not give you a second independent copy of your data, which means there is risk associated with these storage methods.
Most importantly, they can hinder your ability to recover quickly in a massive data loss scenario. For example:
- Litigation hold is about saving data over a long period of time for legal or regulatory compliance purposes, and involves a labour-intensive manual restore process
- Shared Mailboxes are limited in size and negate all organizational hierarchy in their restore process, also making for a time-consuming recovery
If your email boxes become compromised, you need to be able to restore and carry on with business as usual within hours– not within weeks.
Qi does not ask its customers to sign a waiver should they not opt to deploy QiOffice 365 SaaS protect, that would be rude. But we do strongly recommend the adoption of an additional back up service for Office 365 when its use becomes intrinsic to your IT infrastructure.
Thought for the Day
The adoption of Cloud services is the future in computing. Part of that is an increased use of Office 365 and reliance on the use of SharePoint and One Drive. Being able to recover documents quickly and in a structured format is increasingly business critical.
Call Qi today for to get the nominal cost per user per month and arrange deployment of Qi Office 365 SaaS Protect