Backup and data retention in Office 365 apps – Podcast

This is Episode 5 learn more about backup and data retention in Microsoft 365. This episode will be focused on the aspects of doing the backup of your data hosted in Microsoft 365. How data retention, which is part of Office 365 support your need to backup your data and if this is the solution that could help you and in what cases if data retention will not be enough for you, you should consider Tea Party solution to support your requirements or your business requirements connected with the backup process. Of your valuable data hosted in Office 365 applications. At first, point, let’s try to answer why we need the backup process for Office 365. While this backup. How we understood that and how we using what is the purpose to use backup solutions for your data from the perspective of using the backup for your systems or the data hosted in the systems. There are two main reasons why you would like to have it so. First is we need to support any kind of disaster scenario. That will blow up our environment, our data center, or our system applications that will stop work and we will not have access to valuable data that were hosting that we will not be able to work their backup in such scenario will be needed for us to restore. That system will allow us to get back to the last backup point in the time when the system worked the proper way and this first scenario is more IT-related backup need to guarantee high of the ability of the systems. And to secure any kind of disaster and recovery scenarios, which is part of the change management done by IT teams across the company. The second scenario which generates the business need to have a backup for your data is the case when your business users need to restore the files or the records from some point in time. In this case, you can imagine if using SharePoint on-premise, somebody deletes the file, the file is not present in your system, but it’s needed for. Any kind of audit and kind of discussions or collaboration across the company and business came to you with the request. We need to restore that file because it is highly required. This could be a scenario also for the email that disappeared from the email box of the user and you can see in this scenario it’s not something that you have a global outage of the application, but you need to cover the need to restore point in time of the data that is lost for some reason from the system you’re working on this scenario. Is mostly beneficial for the business side of the organization. K but moving to the cloud was not one of the reasons to get rid of all backup solutions. You haven’t cut off all costs connected with that. To be fair, that was one of the reasons that many companies decide to get rid of on-premise and move whole data to the Microsoft 365 environment. Personally, I’m also a big fan of getting rid of traditional backup solutions in cloud environments, but at the same time, we have to look realistically at how the business works. And you will need the scenarios when your business will come to you with their request to restore lost data from Office 365. You will need to mitigate that risk. You can do that both ways using out-of-the-box retention solutions on every Office 365 application or to both third-party backup solutions that will add an additional security layer for restoring the lost data from Office 365. In the next part of this podcast episode, I will share with you how Microsoft Secure that kind of scenario. How you can use retention to restore your data? Where are the real limitations about that? This may give you a better understanding of how to mitigate possible risk with losing the data that is deleted or lost somehow, and if there is a business need to do the investment abroad, third party solution to deliver additional backup player. Remember that you can subscribe to this podcast on Apple, Google Podcasts, Spotify Anchor, YouTube, or whenever you listen right now in this part of the episode, I will describe how it works from the perspective of Microsoft. Many clients ask me came out, does Microsoft do the backup of the solutions? How does it work? Maybe we can use their backup solutions platform, and that’s true. Microsoft does the backup of the data center of the applications on the metadata that is stored there. The company has grade datacenters Azure datacenters. There we are geographically mirrored from the perspective of any kind of natural disaster or service impacting outage Microsoft guarantee that they kept the backup of the whole platform for 14 days and gives the possibility to restore some point in time in five minutes window. But you need to understand that this statement securing only high of the ability of the. Platform from Microsoft’s perspective, so this kind of backup solution is not something that you can use. This is the solution that datacenters engineers from the Microsoft site could use to restore the data in case of any kind of disaster scenario. So Microsoft doing the best using internal backup solutions to guarantee high availability of the solution and to secure any kind of disaster cases that could appear in the local data center. But how it looks like from the perspective of the legal statement from the perspective of the service agreement for the Office 365, Microsoft clearly cells in service of ability that they are not liable for any disruption or loss you may suffer as a result of the outage, and they recommend regularly backup your content and data. That you store on the Office 365 services. Of course, we should assume that this is some kind of legal statement that needs to be there, mostly from a legal perspective, but at the same time, you should be really clear about what Microsoft will guarantee and what’s not. So in this case, if you imagine that you have any kind of critical data, it could be worth considering additional solutions to secure data. If from a legal perspective you are required to do that. And the information I share with you could be a little scary. That may be something really dramatic could happen, but from a historical perspective, there were no situations that Office 365 plus from when the down and the whole data of the client were lost somehow. It also includes the interest of Microsoft to guarantee that platform to be highly available. The quality of the service will be high and stable. You can be sure that this is also Microsoft’s interest to guarantee you high-level service in this area. From your perspective, you will need to decide and understand if out-of-the-box features will be enough for you to mitigate any possible risk of losing the data, or you need any kind of third-party solution to support that process. And before you will buy any third-party solution that will deliver you an external backup platform, it’s worth understanding what kind of internal features are available in the Microsoft 365 environment to secure the possibility to restore lost data from the perspective of other applications like Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint or Exchange. Generally, all these applications have feature cord retention of the data. This kind of feature allows you to restore. Said that this was deleted by the user from very specific locations. From perspective the SharePoint teams and one drive. You will have something called Recycle Bin and second level of the recycle bin that will allow you to restore the data for 92 days and also you have the possibility to ask Microsoft Engineer by additional service request for 14 days after that period of time to restore that data for you from the perspective of the exchange you have the similar possibility to restore the emails that are. Deleted by the user and this is also somehow limited based on the setup of your exchange online. Based on your setup you will have 14 to 30 days to restore the emails from recovery items. Another thing you can set up on your Office 365 environment is the compliance feature that could deliver you the possibility to retain data for a longer period of time. Also, after the user will delete it. This gives you some additional possibility to help the person that will. Lose the data, but one thing you have to remember here is that period of time when you have a time frame when you can restore that data is limited and you can also feel that this is not exactly the backup functionality. You are not able here to restore the files or the records from some point in time. The only thing you can do here is to restore data that is deleted by the person. Of course, there’s also a great security feature for you to give additional support to your business users. Spot for sure, this is no point in time restore possibility which is offers by the backup platforms, so retention policy helping you to secure the area when the users could delete. Data by mistake. For many organizations, that will be everything they need to secure backup possibilities for the business users. If there is a possibility for you to accept that kind of limitation like a limited period of time, limited functionality, then you can use a very good retention feature on your Office 365 environment and secure your business users. If in your case you will need more complex functionality like searching for the data, looking for a point. Of restore to restore a proper version of the file. Although restore the data for a long time, then you should assume that you should look for a third-party solution. Some kind of backup platform that could support that. This is something that is totally not included as a part of Office 365. You can find out the shell materials like links, notes, or articles in episode notes. You will also found their transcription and useful tools that will help you in your journey through Office 365 applications. Finally, let’s try to answer the question when you really need to have a third-party backup to secure data stored in Office 365. I started this discussion from the perspective of two main aspects when you really need to have the backup platform, want is to secure your environment from the perspective of the disaster recovery, and I think that we can tell that this is something that is really well covered by Microsoft itself. Of course, if from any kind of formal aspects you need to deliver a similar backup solution. Like the business you working in requires or procedures you need to follow require you to have additional backup plus from then probably you will need to choose the backup solution. The second scenario when the backup is really needed is when you have to support your business users from mistakes or you have very sensitive data that cannot be lost in any way. In such cases, choosing the backup platform will be probably needed for you. What I could recommend from the perspective of very healthy steps. When you start to think about the backup solution is to start to think about it from the perspective of categorization of the data. Nominations of the critical data for the organization and web users nominated in the organization. You will see that most backup platforms are licensed per user, so it’s really good to limit the group included in the backup process and do not back up the whole organization itself because the cost will be quite high till many solutions could support you and you have multiple possibilities to check which backup platform will be the best for you. On the Office 365 atwork.com block, you will found the comparison of the backup platforms. You will also found multiple articles that showing how native solutions and retentions feature from the perspective of the exchange teams. One drive and SharePoint could support you in securing your data in Office 365. Maybe in the case of your local business, these features will be totally enough to guarantee high-quality service for your business users in another way. You can review available backup solutions and choose the best solution that will fit to your expectations in the episode notes you will find the links to all articles that cover these topics and if you have any additional questions, please feel free to raise them in the comments on the block. I will be more than happy to give you my feedback and share my experiences with these tools. Thank you for listening to this episode. You can always get back to it by visiting Office 365 atwork.com/five. See you in the next episode. Viva applications are still a little mystery for me. We will see how strongly they will impact the way how people work can improve the well-being of employees across the globe. Using Microsoft Teams and Office 365. Hopefully, there will be business cases to use them, but I’m glad that Microsoft change narration across the new functionality’s to bring some kind of business context and to sell them better to the end-users across the globe. Hopefully applications like. Connections, topics, learnings and insights will be something that we will use in daily work in the future. Of course, we will see what the future will bring. Course, I hope that we will get back to the offices and will be not forced to work Home Office all the time but still have that kind of applications will always add value.