Office 365Backup6 ways your business could suffer if you don’t backup Office 365

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For all the convenience, reliability, productivity and economy it delivers to your daily workflows, Office 365’s extremely limited versioning, retention and retrieval capabilities make it nothing less than a ticking time-bomb for your organisation.

Bluntly, when (not if) you get hit by an urgent need to restore backed-up data, in order to safeguard the continuity of your operations, Office 365 is highly likely to let you down.

To put the potential consequences of using backup-less Office 365 into perspective, consider these sobering statistics around data loss:

Much of your data is already exposed

An estimated 21% of all folders in an average company – including your Office 365 data - are open to everyone, exposing them to huge risks. (Comparitech, 2019)

Data loss costs in more ways than one

According to Beaming (2018), over 33% of lost data is, or includes, customer information and financial information, which can be hugely damaging to business continuity, reputation and income.

Data loss can be the end

A study carried out by the British Chambers of Commerce found that 93% of businesses that suffer extended data loss file for bankruptcy within one year – and 50% immediately.

Here we identify six separate ways your organisation could seriously suffer as a result of failing to use a true backup solution to protect its Office 365 data.

The following pages detail six horrors that could happen if you don’t backup Office 365 (and why)

Whether you urgently need to find and restore previous emails, OneDrive files or SharePoint content, with Office 365 you’re up against a number of issues.

These include insufficient retention (only 14 days by default!), the ever-present danger of definitively deleting data, a rapidly exceeded version limit that automatically erases earlier data you might still need to restore, and clumsy storage extension that is also expensive.

Basically, Office 365 makes it phenomenally easy for your organisation to lose valuable data regularly, unpredictably, unintentionally, and for good - creating six potential horror scenarios...

backupvault.co.ukBlueraq Networks Ltd, 1 Aldgate, London, EC3N 1RE

Office 365 Backup | 6 ways your business could suffer if you don’t backup Office 365

Spoiler alert: Office 365 does not backup your data!

01/06

01

Accidental - and permanent - deletionA well-meaning employee decides to tidy up some files and free up some storage space. Into the Deleted Items folder go emails, OneDrive files and SharePoint content.

At this point, the clock is ticking. If those deletions contain vital data, you have a maximum of only 60 days (30 days in the Deleted Items folder, 14 days by default in the Recoverable Items folder with a further optional 16 days available) before they are automatically deleted and gone forever. You will never get them back.

If you think this doesn’t happen too often, think again: Beaming’s 2018 research estimated that accidental deletion makes up a significant part of up to 44% of all instances of data loss.

backupvault.co.ukBlueraq Networks Ltd, 1 Aldgate, London, EC3N 1RE

Office 365 Backup | 6 ways your business could suffer if you don’t backup Office 365

02/06 backupvault.co.ukBlueraq Networks Ltd, 1 Aldgate, London, EC3N 1RE

Office 365 Backup | 6 ways your business could suffer if you don’t backup Office 365

02 Easy pickings for malicious insidersAnother alarmingly risky feature of Office 365 is that it enables the Recoverable Items folder – the very last resort in its preservation of deleted data – to be manually purged at any time.

The disgruntled employee doesn’t need to wait 60 days for their maliciously deleted data to gratifyingly disappear forever – they can wreak all that havoc in a mouse click!

03/06 backupvault.co.ukBlueraq Networks Ltd, 1 Aldgate, London, EC3N 1RE

Office 365 Backup | 6 ways your business could suffer if you don’t backup Office 365

03

Rampant ransomware and other malware and virusesIf you thought data and applications in the cloud are in a place where ransomware can’t take them hostage, you’d be wrong.

New strains like RansomCloud are specifically designed to infiltrate cloud-based services. Recent industry intelligence reports that 28% of IT service providers surveyed have seen ransomware attacks in cloud applications, with around 50% reporting attacks in Office 365 specifically. As backup is the only truly effective defence against ransomware, this spells potential disaster for many Office 365 users.

Malware and viruses can also potentially exploit backupless Office 365’s inbuilt weaknesses in more subtle ways than ransomware or unauthorised purging, for example by creating more data versions than the system can store, thus pushing some of the genuine versions over the edge into eventually permanent erasure – totally noiselessly and unnoticed.

04/06 backupvault.co.ukBlueraq Networks Ltd, 1 Aldgate, London, EC3N 1RE

Office 365 Backup | 6 ways your business could suffer if you don’t backup Office 365

04 Riled regulatorsGDPR has forced data legality and compliance to the very top of most organisations’ agendas, and it’s about to get its second wind, thanks to the Government’s recently published guide emphasising the incorporation of most elements of GDPR law into the revised UK Data Protection Act post-Brexit.

For Office 365 users across many sectors and industries, this shines an uncomfortable spotlight on the data compliance transgressions they could be committing under these continuing laws if they do not have effective backup in place.

But it doesn’t stop there - many sectors and industries impose their own regulatory requirements around backup, too.

To cite just a handful of examples (there are many others) the education sector, for example, imposes a clear obligation on schools, according to the Schools Financial Value Standard (SFVS), to ensure their data is backed up offsite daily.

In banking and finance, the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) tells its members: “Unsecured backup and storage of customer data leave you at risk. We expect you to review your data backup procedures regularly…”

And in the legal profession, the Law Society requires its members to create and keep records documenting all their “data backup, archiving and deletion routines.”

Increasingly, across most of the verticals and markets in which Office 365 users operate, no backup is a red rag to the regulators!

05/06 backupvault.co.ukBlueraq Networks Ltd, 1 Aldgate, London, EC3N 1RE

Office 365 Backup | 6 ways your business could suffer if you don’t backup Office 365

05 Costly, clumsy risky retentionOffice 365’s inbuilt tools are a nightmare for anybody seeking to implement and follow an effective, manageable and legally robust data retention policy.

Why? Because the number of data versions the system can hold by default is very limited, but also because the only way of extending that versioning capacity – the Retention Lock feature – is by eating into your storage allowance and forcing you to buy more!

This extended versioning is also permanent. Once you’ve switched the additional retention on, it applies itself for ever to your data – you can’t turn it off, vary its scope or reach, or control it.

Now consider what that means for legal circumstances that might require data retention to be reversed or disabled – the right to be forgotten, for example, or legal hold.

It’s a blunt instrument that could see the lawyers getting their knives out.

06/06 backupvault.co.ukBlueraq Networks Ltd, 1 Aldgate, London, EC3N 1RE

Office 365 Backup | 6 ways your business could suffer if you don’t backup Office 365

06 One basket. All eggs broken.The cloud is just somebody else’s servers. They’re not immune to outage, data loss or other failure, which is why putting all your data ‘eggs’ in any one cloud-provided, backupless ‘basket’ (like Office 365) invites grave risk in one fell swoop.

Even if the data is in some way retrievable following an incident, if you don’t have the degree of control over it that a true backup solution would provide, the process is likely to be long, complicated and damaging, with all-or-nothing restores that can destroy complex and important versioning.

The cardinal rule of data backup is ‘3-2-1’ – three copies of your data on two different pieces of media, one of which should be offsite relative to the others. Going with one cloud provider clearly violates this rule, but you shouldn’t look to the vendor to take steps to correct it – their cloud is not your backup.

backupvault.co.ukBlueraq Networks Ltd, 1 Aldgate, London, EC3N 1RE

Office 365 Backup | 6 ways your business could suffer if you don’t backup Office 365

Office 365 backup: it’s your responsibilityWe hope this guide has helped you understand the potential consequences to your organisation of using Office 365 without backup.

But it’s also critical that you appreciate the responsibility for putting that backup in place is yours and yours alone. Microsoft accept no liability for data loss in Office 365, and make no guarantees against it, as the following extract from their service agreement shows:

“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 backup Your Content and Data that you store on the Services…”

So, shall we help you get started?

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