It is easily forgotten that there is no backup for Office 365 applications.  In fact, 75% of organisations that use Office 365 email, do not backup.  There is a 30-day retention period but that is all. The Sharepoint Online service is backed up every 12 hours with only a 14-day retention.  The other services just use retention and revision policies for protection so a compromised admin account could cause disaster. There is no 3.2.1 backup rule applied and if you need strong data recovery then you need Veeam backup.
Businesses of all sizes are migrating to Microsoft Office 365 at a rapid pace. Over the last two years, Office 365 has become the industry’s most widely used business cloud service. Nearly 80% of IT decision makers surveyed by Gartner in early 2016 said they were either currently using or planning to use Office 365 software and services.
This growth is a direct result of the immense value it delivers to organisations, particularly in allowing IT to manage and scale email through Exchange Online. With Office 365, IT teams do not have to build and maintain their own separate email infrastructure and can therefore deploy personnel and resources more strategically.
However, there are also challenges IT Managers must address to ensure that Office 365 email meets your company’s and the impending GDPR requirements. You need to ensure that you are in control of your own data to access it for disaster recovery. It is your data and if it is not available it is your responsibility. This applies to any company using Office 365 for email, from small and midsize businesses to larger enterprises running Office 365 in a hybrid cloud environment.
The key to ensuring you can maintain control is to follow the 3-2-1 best practices rule for data protection.
Failure to have a separate backup can put your company at risk for unplanned downtime of key applications and services, and a loss of productivity for users of those applications and services. You may also be unable to satisfy compliance requirements or meet recovery time and recovery point objectives.
One risk is the possibility of user error or user confusion about Microsoft’s retention and preservation policies.  A user may think he or she is retaining emails, when, in fact, the 
data was not retained. Another risk is that users may not understand the costs involved 
in using Office 365 for retention and preservation. Cloud storage can get expensive and cost containment can be problematic in today’s environment, where employees use email all the time and think nothing about attaching large files such as PowerPoint presentations to their messages.
So what is the solution?
Whether your organisation has completely migrated to Office 365 or you use a hybrid on-premises Exchange and Office 365 deployment, your business objectives remain the same – you need to have an independent backup of your data outside of the original location to meet availability, data protection, data recovery and compliance requirements.
The best way to achieve these objectives—and to control costs at the same time—is to deploy modern ‘Availability Software’ that has been designed specifically to meet the backup, recovery and compliance challenges of Office 365 email.
Take control of your data. With on-premises availability, the IT team can exert greater control of where data is stored based on its value to the organisation and how quickly it may need to be recovered. Data that is still current and may need to be accessed quickly can be both on-premises and in the cloud. You also gain control by having flexible recovery options, leveraging either granular searches or access to the entire database, depending on your requirements.
Empowering your IT team to take control of your organisation’s Office 365 data. Microsoft takes care of the hardware and system maintenance, but it is critical that you protect and control your data on your terms.
Reducing the time and effort required to restore email data: This will help to ensure availability and meet more stringent RTPOs for regulatory compliance and e-discovery.
Protecting against data loss scenarios that are not covered by standard or customised retention policies. Whilst Microsoft takes on many management tasks in Office 365, it is your data and your responsibility to control it. 
And it is yours to take with you if you decide to leave the service.  Moving the data to MS’s infrastructure doesn’t remove the traditional requirements for protecting it with a backup.
Choosing the Right Solution 
Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 enables organisations to achieve the 3-2-1 rule in data protection whilst reducing costs, mitigating risk and enabling greater IT control over critical Availability requirements.
With Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365, you can retrieve Office 365 Exchange Online mailbox items from a cloud-based instance of Office 365 and back up this mailbox data into the same format that Microsoft Exchange uses. 
These capabilities allow for quick search and recovery of individual mailbox items residing in either archived Office 365 content or on-premises Exchange backups. Mailbox items can be restored directly to an Office 365 mailbox or an on-premises Exchange mailbox.
With the right solution in place, IT Managers can reduce costs, improve Availability and maintain control of vital email data to meet their most stringent data protection, compliance and e-discovery requirements.
Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 is the industry’s leading modern Availability solution, designed to meet all of your key challenges in accessing, controlling and protecting Office 365 email data.
To have a 30-day ’no-hassle’ free trial, please complete the following form http://www.ct.co.uk/contact-us/ or get in touch with your Account Manager today.
