Microsoft 365 Backup: Why your business needs to use it!

There are several ways that data can become lost, each one emphasise the importance of keeping a backup version:

• Human Error. This may be accidental, perhaps deleting what you thought were duplicate files or out of date information, or were you just tidying up folders? Whatever the reason, human error is a common cause of data loss.
• Data retention policies. Organisation put these in place to ensure that specific types of data and information are retained for operational effectiveness, but retaining information isn’t the same as backing it up. Policies can be misunderstood, or data wrongly categorised by users, and subsequently deleted. Retention policies rely on employee awareness and can be difficult to manage, so they need a backup policy in place to support them.
• Internal security threats. As unlikely as it may seem, an employee can become disgruntled and be the perpetrator of a malicious act, involving the deliberate deletion or theft of vital information.
• External security threats. Not only is the risk of cyber-crime increasing but the sophistication of the threat is growing too. Businesses can find their data corrupted or held to ransom, with serious costs and consequences to their operations and reputation.
• Disruption to Microsoft 365. These may be rare and organisations like Microsoft stake their reputation on providing consistently high service, but power outages or service disruption can happen and when they do, it means unplanned downtime for your business, with data unavailable. You may even find that some of your most recent data is missing, unless you had backed it up.
• Legal and compliance requirements. There are clear and specific regulations that all organisations must comply with to manage and secure data. In addition, some sectors have further requirements that business must adhere to if they wish to maintain industry standards. Many of these guidelines will be around how long specific types of data are retained for; therefore making a backup is a wise precaution.
• Managing email migration. However your email is managed, whether on-premises exchange or Cloud-based, data also needs to be managed, especially during a migration, so that none is lost.
• Reliance on platforms. It’s often taken for granted that platforms such as SharePoint, Exchange, OneDrive and Microsoft 365 will always be available. We don’t appreciate the sheer volume of data they hold for us and just how critical it all is to our day-to-day operations. This complete reliance on its availability is another reason to ensure that data is always available via a backup.