Many businesses, including your own, maybe taking advantage of Microsoft’s Office 365 solution for providing business-critical services such as email and file storage among others. As you are aware, Office 365 includes great features to businesses looking to empower their employee’s productivity across the board.
Once your data exists in the Microsoft Office 365 cloud, backing up your Office 365 data becomes extremely important. When data lives in an extremely resilient cloud environment like Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud ecosystem, while are backups necessary? Why should you use cloud-to-cloud backups of your data? Which solution provides the best Office 365 backup tool?
Why Companies Need to Back Up Their Data
When thinking about a major public cloud provider like Microsoft, why would you have to capture backups of your data? Isn’t your data safe in such an ultra-resilient environment? Well, despite the resiliency and uptime ratings, public cloud environments do experience outages and unplanned downtime.
Aside from any potential downtime, you may experience from a cloud provider, two extremely dangerous risks to your data come from end-user mistakes and actions as well as cybersecurity threats such as ransomware. These are extremely important reasons for backing up your cloud data.
End-User Mistakes and Actions
One of the most formidable threats to your data is your own end users. Data loss as a result of end-user mistakes and actions is extremely common. Common scenarios involving end-users include users accidentally deleting data they had mistaken as non-critical or data they had misidentified.
Users may also mistakenly update files and perform a Save operation instead of a Save As to properly create a new version of the file. This may result in key data being deleted.
Cybersecurity Threats to your Data – Ransomware
There are really only two ways out of a ransomware attack that is holding your data hostage – paying the ransom or restoring from backups.
Ransomware can infect files in the cloud due to file synchronization of on-premises files to the cloud that are infected with ransomware or by opening malicious emails that can encrypt your mailbox in the cloud as shown by Kevin Mitnick’s “ransomcloud” demo.
While Microsoft offers a few “lightweight” recovery options for files in OneDrive storage such as mild versioning, this is limited in time and scope that you are allowed to recover your data. Additionally, there is no versioning or recovery offered for Office 365 email.
Why Use Cloud Solutions for Data Backup?
A common characteristic you will see listed for many of the third-party backup solutions that backup Office 365, G Suite, and others are they are some type of “cloud backup” or “cloud-to-cloud” backup. What does this mean exactly and what benefits does it afford?
Cloud-to-cloud backups are backups of a cloud environment that are stored in the cloud. Online backup solution vendors can take advantage of cloud features and capabilities which include storage, network, and facilities redundancy that is hard to duplicate with on-premises storage resources. This translates to better protection and resiliency for your backup
Let’s look at a few examples of vendors utilizing the cloud for their online backup solution. Backupify is a cloud-to-cloud backup solution that allows creating backups of Office 365 environments and storing them in a “private cloud” that is made up of their own private architecture in their own datacenters. Spanning is another online backup vendor that provides backups of Office 365 and the ability to store them inside of AWS S3 storage.
Another solution is Spinbackup Office 365 backups which provide the most flexibility of the offerings on the market to store your Office 365 backups. Spinbackup offers multiple cloud environments as the storage target for backups of the Office 365 environment. Possible storage targets for Spinbackup Office 365 backups include Amazon S3 Storage, Microsoft Azure Storage, and Google GCP cloud storage.
Why is Spinbackup the Best Office 365 Backup Tool?
When comparing the available features between Office 365 backup solutions, Spinbackup stands out in the field of competitors when looking at available Office 365 backup vendors. Let’s see why. Why choose Spinbackup?
Spinbackup provides many great Office 365 backup features
Spinbackup provides great overall value for businesses looking to backup their Office 365 data and provides key features and functionality that overall, makes it stand out among competitors.
The core features of Spinbackup Office 365 backup includes:
- Fully automated backups and granular restores
- Cloud-to-Cloud backups – configurable between multiple public cloud vendors
- Data Migration
- Long-term data archival with configurable retention
- Advanced Security for backups
- Searchable backups
Let’s look at these in a bit more detail to see how Spinbackup provides the best Office 365 backup tool.
Fully automated backups and granular restores
When you protect your Office 365 environment, you want to ensure you have a backup solution that provides fully automated backups of your environment. This means you can rely on the solution to automatically backup your business-critical files, email and other resources. Spinbackup provides backups of Email, OneDrive, Calendars, People, and SharePoint. This allows you to be protected from ransomware and “ransomcloud” threats to your environment. Additionally, threats from your end users are covered with Spinbackup backups.
Cloud-to-Cloud Backups
The cloud-to-cloud backup functionality is one of the areas where Spinbackup shines. Out of a long list of competitors, Spinbackup provides the most options for storing your backups. When setting up your Spinbackup Office 365 backup integration, you can choose from different regions in Amazon AWS, Google GCP, and Microsoft Azure storage locations.
Data Migration
Data migration becomes extremely important when users leave your organization. Certain users may have important services or other data associated with their particular account. If you`re performing complex data migrations such as Hosted Exchange Server to Office 365 Migration then you might need to take a backup of your mailboxes with Spinbackup before you proceed with the actual migration.
Having the ability to migrate this data from one Office 365 account to another allows you to easily keep the data and get rid of unneeded accounts in the organization.
Long-term data archival with configurable retention
Regulatory and other data compliance requirements are extremely important for businesses across all sectors. This can require businesses to keep data on hand for legal or other reasons. Spinbackup provides the ability to have unlimited retention of your data. This means you can have a seamless solution between normal backups that simply transition to long-term backups with the number of retention points you keep on hand. This greatly simplifies the process of backup and archive data with Spinbackup.
Spinbackup provides a clean and intuitive dashboard interface
Advanced Backup Security Features
Security should be a major part of your backup planning and infrastructure. When you think about it, backups of production environments are essentially production data. If an attacker gains access to backup data, they have access to your production environment.
Spinbackup provides you with advanced backup security including encryption both in-flight and at-rest as well as role-based access to the backup environment.
Searchable Backups
Spinbackup’s searchable backups allow you to find files and data very quickly across a multitude of backups and restore points. This allows you to quickly find the data and get it restored when minutes and even seconds count.
All of this functionality with Spinbackup protecting your Office 365 environment is available for $3 per user/month.
Concluding Thoughts
Protecting your data is crucial. Due to any number of data loss threats such as end-users and ransomware, data can be lost without warning. Having an effective solution to backup your data in the Office 365 cloud is absolutely necessary. Cloud-to-cloud backups provide a great means to protect your data from one cloud to another. It also allows you to reap the resiliency benefits of cloud vendor infrastructure for your backup storage.
Spinbackup for Office 365 stands out in the field of cloud-to-cloud backup solutions in the features for price comparison. No other solution provides the diversity of storage locations, features, and mix of both backup and cybersecurity features. Sign up for a fully-featured trial version of Spinbackup for Office 365 here.
Check out Spinbackup’s fully-featured trial version of Office 365 backup