A common misconception among customers who have purchased Office 365 is that they don't need to back up. Surely it should be the case that via cloud services you get the storage in the cloud and Microsoft has a high level of IT security, right? Microsoft obviously has high data security and protects its servers from data loss by storing copies in different geographical locations. As a Swedish customer you will normally have your data stored in Ireland and the Netherlands. Then it also performs backups on these servers, but they are not for customers but to protect internal IT operations in case of a disaster. Therefore it is important that you as an Office 365 customer understand how it works and below we have tried to explain this.
Backup is necessary even for Office 365
Documents deleted in OneDrive or SharePoint are placed in the service's Recycle Bin, which provides a form of short-term backup or storage of deleted files. The recycle bin is managed by the account holder and files can be restored on their own. Normally files remain in the site's recycle bin for 30 days. After 30 days, or if files in the Recycle Bin are deleted, they are placed in a second Recycle Bin, the Site Collection Recycle Bin. From here, the administrator can retrieve the file if necessary. Files remain in both bins for a total of 93 days. After that time, there is no protection for destroyed files or the possibility to retrieve files. Office 365 also provides versioning, which allows the recovery of previous versions of documents, but again there is a limit of 90 days on average. Beyond that, documents cannot be recovered. It is important to check that version control is enabled.
If a customer is hit by a crypto-virus on their device, the encrypted files will be synced online the next time you connect to the cloud. In Office 365 you can normally restore documents to previous versions, but some cryptoviruses rename the file names which means that this is not possible. In that case, a traditional backup will be the only solution. The same applies if your business needs backups for more than about 90 days - which pretty much everyone does. So if your company doesn't already have Office 365 backed up, you need to add a backup service as soon as possible.
Contact our sales department at sales@storegate.se and we'll help you find the right solution for your business. We also have a wide dealer network that can help on site.
