Office 365 is the market leader for email and business applications but the move to home and flexible working has made many of us even more reliant on Office 365, including Teams for collaborative working. There is a common misconception that Microsoft are looking after your data, as well as providing you with the applications you need to run your business.
While Microsoft do a great job and keeping those familiar applications updated and maintaining uptime for users, the responsibility for the data sits firmly with the user, as set out in Microsoft’s Service Agreement.
“We strive to keep the Services up and running; however, all online services suffer occasional disruptions and outages, and Microsoft is not liable for any disruption or loss you may suffer as a result. In the event of an outage, you may not be able to retrieve Your Content or Data that you’ve stored. We recommend that you regularly back up Your Content and Data that you store on the Services or store using Third-Party Apps and Services.”
This is especially critical in a home-working environment, as your team may have changed their working arrangements. Where once we might have saved documents to a server, we are now increasingly using OneDrive or SharePoint to store our files.
So, Microsoft are recommending that you back up your data, what do you need to think about?
Data can become corrupted in a number of ways. We constantly hear about the increasing prevalence and sophistication of cyber attacks but accidental or malicious deletion of data by your team can also cause big problems. Loss of data can not only lead to business continuity issues, any data protection issues may be reportable or impact client or stakeholder confidence in your business.
You may also need to maintain backups for legal or compliance purposes, particularly in regulated industries such as the financial sector.
We’re not in the business of scaremongering but we do believe that there is a gap in business owners’ knowledge about their Office 365 data.
The good news is that there is a straightforward solution.
Taking daily backups of all Office 365 data and files is the best way to make sure that your business information is secure and your team can keep working in the event of any outage.
As well as peace of mind that your data is secure, backups also provide you with control of your own data. Having the backup is one thing, but having the ability to restore it quickly so your team can keep working is even more important.
We partner with Veeam, the market leader in backup and data recovery solutions to keep our own and our clients’ data safe. We can back up all Office 365 data, including Outlook emails and contacts and documents in OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams. For additional security, we can also backup the entire contents of your computer so, if something happened to your laptop, an identical laptop could be set up from the backup within the hour.
If you would like to discuss how Neos can help you keep your data safe, please contact us at hello@neos-it.com or 0207 488 6150.