Microsoft Office 365
‍Does Not Backup Your Data

Microsoft Office 365 is now the industry go to for businesses wanting to streamline their operations and move to the cloud, this has resulted in a huge migration away from self hosted / on premise servers. This has reduced man power requirements, upfront hardware costs and on going maintenance costs, never mind the headache of each project.

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But do we know what we are signing up for?

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Here are a few things to think about before moving to Microsoft Office 365

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Is it safe? How many users do Microsoft have using Office 365?

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Microsoft have 1.2 billion users worldwide with 60 million commercial customers on monthly subscriptions, these are astronomical numbers meaning they are doing something right!

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It’s a lot safer than having a server that you leave unmanned over weekends so if you don’t have an IT team on site, I would consider the move to Office 365.

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Why do I need a backup solution for my Office 365, it’s backed up with Microsoft?

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Here’s the reality, Microsoft will keep retention data (deleted files or emails) for 30 days as default, this could be any data that is purposely or accidentally deleted. To extend this it can get costly and you have to manually set this up in your 365 account admin area. The danger of this is because of limited space provided by Microsoft, users will purge older data to make space for new data without realising the deleted data that wasn’t important today actually becomes important 6 months down the line.

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How much storage do I need to backup my Office 365 mailbox?

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All standard mailboxes allow 50gb of storage for mailbox data, so when a backup provider says we will give you unlimited mailbox storage it’s because you can only accumulate so much data in there…50gb to be exact. But this marketing strategy works when a customer isn’t educated on the products they own.

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Regulated Industries and Backup Regulations

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If you operate a healthcare, finance or legal firm you may need to archive data for long periods of time for access requirements, this can prove tricky without a backup solution. Third party backup solutions will allow you to keep data indefinitely without hassle, set it and forget it as the software does all of the leg work.

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Ransomware vulnerability

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If you operate solely on one platform, (Office 365) you run the risk of data loss at the hands of Cyber Criminals. There are 1000’s of hackers looking for vulnerabilities in large company services and Microsoft are one of the biggest player in the tech industry so there’s a guarantee someone is trying to get in to their servers. If this happens and for some reason your data is lost without backup, I’m sorry to say, but your data may be lost forever…could you recover from this and operate without your data?

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Does Cloud Dolphin use Office 365?

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Yes, we use Office 365 for email and Sharepoint alongside our own backup solution with indefinite retention, we keep our historic operational data forever!

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Essentially you should do your research before dedicating your business to a service, understand the products available and ensure you mitigate the risk by running a backup solution alongside your chosen platform. This will future proof your business and provide business continuity which is essential in today’s technical age.

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Cloud Dolphin provides industry leading technology to backup all of your business data from any application you may use in your business.

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