Backup & Recovery Strategies: Is Your Office 365 Data Protected? - Interlink Cloud Blog

Your Office 365 data is critical to the success of your business.

Are you protecting it appropriately?
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Modern Data Management & Backup Strategies

Interlink has seen many organizations fall behind in their data management and backup strategy – and thus incur risks. Organizations must look at not only data centers and endpoints, but also at their Office 365 data to ensure their environment is properly protected and mitigating risk. Microsoft Office 365 monthly active usage is continually growing across the world – and e-mail, calendar items, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams files cannot be overlooked for businesses to be adequately prepared for backup/recovery scenarios.

Microsoft provides native backup/recovery capabilities, though third-party solutions can offer extended data protection and granular recovery options - for SLA (Service Level Agreement) compliance and rapid recovery from deletion, corruption, or attack. Best practices for data protection include having multiple copies of your data (housed outside source and production environments), proper retention policies, and a data strategy that doesn’t solely rely on on-premises technology. Many organizations need to keep data longer for industry requirements, legal reasons, and to meet compliance or regulatory bodies. While retention policies are important, they do not substitute for a true backup which should capture configurations/settings/security/etc. that are focused beyond the content level.

Best Backup & Recovery Practices

Protecting your organization’s work and data across Microsoft Office 365 is crucial to reducing risk and saving money in the event of deletion, corruption, or ransomware attacks. A rule of thumb all organizations should follow is the 3-2-1 rule. This means having 3 copies of your data on 2 different pieces of media, and 1 of which should be off-site. A third-party solution can help organizations achieve having 1 copy outside of Microsoft 365. Here is a compiled list of best practices every organization should be considering when choosing a backup and recovery solution.

• On-premises versus Cloud Backup:

  Backup solutions that are Cloud-based enable your organization to rapidly recover and maintain business processes from deletion, corruption, or an attack. Only using on-premises solutions is limited in this regard and can pose a huge risk in the event of a disaster recovery scenario. Utilizing a Cloud-based SaaS backup enables organizations to move away from physical hardware, capital expenditures, and routine maintenance efforts to protect their on-prem data. Additionally, choosing a backup solution that is easily scalable over time is key. Unlimited storage and retention solutions avoid limitations that could put your growing business at risk of losing data otherwise.
  
  

• Granularity:

  The level of granularity your backup and recovery solution offers will fundamentally determine the ease of recovery for your organization. Being able to effortlessly locate active or deleted data, rapidly recover from attacks, and have in-place restoration of valuable data across Office 365 applications will help ensure minimal downtime for critical business operations. Third-party solutions offer the most granular restore options – going into the Microsoft Office 365 Suite, such as Microsoft Teams, and not just Exchange and SharePoint.
  • Microsoft Teams: Microsoft Teams houses an abundance of data. From hundreds of users to thousands of files, to millions of conversations, Teams is the primary interface for your employees. And it all needs protecting. With robust item-level search and advanced in-place restore options, third-party solutions can enable users to find and recover Teams data, while preserving the overarching settings and layout. This means admins can rapidly restore their valuable Teams data, back to where it belongs – all while maintaining the overall site structure.
    
    

• Security Posture:

  With the proper data protection strategies in place, organizations can mitigate the risk of successful ransomware attacks and instill high levels of business continuity. Industry experts recommend employing a dedicated, third-party solution that stores data outside of bad actors’ reach and provides robust tools for data recovery. SaaS-delivered solutions can also provide an additional layer of security – operating in a separate security domain outside of customer environments.
  
  

• Third-Party Solutions:

  Data protection is worth investing in. Many organizations require features for compliance or industry standards that increase their ability to backup and granularly restore across Office 365. Third-party solutions enable a faster/cleaner process to recover from a major incident and can provide features like metadata search of inboxes, notifications/alerts, granular recovery, automation, and policy-based retention capabilities.

Learn More About Office 365 Data Protection: Metallic™ Office 365 Backup & Recovery

Interlink is able to share a piece of thought leadership and a practical roadmap for organizations to understand the modern challenges of data protection. To learn more about Office 365 data protection and discover what it takes for a solution to bring enterprise-grade backup and recovery, view industry leader Metallic’s premium eBook for free today!

What Interlink Recommends

Interlink’s experts see numerous environments of all industries. Metallic, a Commvault Venture, provides the best solution for an organization’s Office 365 data while leveraging the simplicity and ease of use of SaaS. Take advantage of the easy-to-implement (setup and backing up within 15-20 minutes) and automatic updates of a SaaS model, while benefitting from the sophisticated underlying scale, performance, and security from Commvault baked into the solution. With Metallic as a third-party solution, your data is truly backed up and easily recovered in a separate hub, in case of disaster or corruption of your Microsoft Office 365 account data.

Interlink can also extend a promotional offer where for every three users purchased, organizations receive one user for free! This is valid until March 31, 2022.

Contact Interlink to learn more about Metallic and this promotional offer today!