Office 365 is the most popular platform in the enterprise sector, where data protection often fall in 5 common Office 365 backup mistakes you should avoid to keep your data safe.
Moving services such as emails to SaaS solutions (Microsoft Office 365 for example), not always is clear who is responsible for the data protection and availability. Relying on providers backup tools is not enough to protect your data keeping them safe and available. Run for cover once the damage occurred could have a huge impact on business data.
During the migration plan to Office 365 not always all the involved steps are taken into consideration. Sometime there is a poor attention to the most important aspect of the business, that is data protection.
5 common Office 365 backup mistakes
These are the 5 common backup mistakes when organization leverages Office 365 services.
1. No backup for Office 365 environment
When you have your business on the Office 365 platform, you must ensure to have understood what Microsoft responsibilities are and what are yours. By contract Microsoft must guarantee the Office 365 infrastructure availability only and not stored data. Organizations must protect their Office 365 environments to ensure data integrity and availability.
Items accidentally deleted, changed or overwritten cannot be recovered without a proper backup strategy. Although Microsoft provides a minimal protection, retention policies set by Microsoft (typically 30 days) may clash or differ against corporate requirements.
Introduced in version 9.2, Nakivo Backup & Replication provides a valid solution to protect the Office 365 environment saving data on-premises for a faster and secure access.
2. Backup not compliant with the 3-2-1 backup rule
A good and efficient backup design must comply the 3-2-1 backup rule:
- 3 copies of backup - having a single backup is not enough to guarantee data integrity and availability, especially if it stored on a single point of failure component.
- 2 different storage media - storing one backup on a storage, and a copy on tape or cloud ensure protection in case one media fails.
- 1 offsite backup - keeping a copy on a offsite storage ensures data availability in case of disaster in the primary site.
Having a single backup in the same site of the production is not a good idea if something horrible wrong occurs to the primary site, Microsoft cloud in this example. If you need to access or restore data from the backup and everything is stored only in cloud, what happens if the cloud provider experiences some issues? You can't access your data and this could cost money to the organizations.
When designing your backup infrastructure make sure to follow this simple rule.
3. No protection for all items and services
Office 365 doesn't provide emails only. Contacts, calendar, tasks, OneDrive, and SharePoint are additional services organizations may use for their business. It is extremely important to protect all these components to avoid services disruption or data loss.
Nakivo provides protection for the following Office 365 items:
- Exchange Online
- OneDrive for Business
- SharePoint Online
- Contacts and calendars
4. Secure backups against intruders
One of the most important aspect to consider for backups is that they contain production data. If data ends up into the wrong hands, it could be a problem for the organization since sensitive data may be exposed.
The need of protecting backups by keeping your data safe from prying eyes, requires making data backup unreadable if taken away from intruders, that is encrypted.
To fully protect your data, Nakivo provides the capability to encrypt in flight and at rest using the AES-256 standard encryption preventing unauthorized accesses.
5. No protection against ransomware
Ransomware is perhaps the most common attack organizations are experiencing in the last year against their business data. Without an appropriate backup strategy, data can be seriously compromised and quite often lost forever. When you run a backup you must ensure integrity and availability of your data. Backups should be protected against deletion, changes, and intentional overwriting.
Modern technology allows the administrator to have backup solutions capable to protect data making them "immutable" leveraging Backup Repositories on-premises XFS-based and Object Storage solutions with Object Lock capability, such as Amazon S3 and Wasabi for instance.
Nakivo Backup & Replication provides Immutable Repository and Object Lock capabilities to protect your backups against ransomware and intruders.
Nakivo Backup & Replication offers all the required features to keep your Office 365 safe and protected. Nakivo is available to download as 30-day trial.
