Your O365 Mailboxes are Backed-up, Right?

More and more organisations are electing to move their corporate email service to O365.  It removes the burden of managing email servers from your IT team, it gives that peace of mind that your corporate email is safe in a highly resilient cloud environment and it provides your end-users with accessibility from any location using any device.

However, it is very common that when migrating email services to O365 that organisations simply stop the prudent step of backing-up their end-user mailboxes and critical documents held within SharePoint, OneDrive or Teams.

When it’s gone, it’s gone…

We’ve all been there, the desperate hunt for that important email, a key notification from a customer or supplier, an instruction to a colleague or critical information you noted down in an email you sent. You know it was there, but why can’t you find it?

We have become dependent on email; it is the primary way we communicate both formally and informally and most of us cannot start to contemplate the impact personally or for the business we work for if we were to lose the contents of our mailbox.

The reality is, O365 does not back-up your mailbox. It is simply a case of when an email has gone, it has really gone.

So what could possibly go wrong…

O365 is a resilient platform, so what possibly could go wrong? Although this is correct, there are still risks to the content of your mailboxes. We all accidentally delete things.  How many times do you go hunting in your deleted items folder and save the life of a critical item? This is fine if you catch your mistake within the time-period items are retained in your deleted items folder, but what happens after that?  The good news is that Microsoft provides you with a further 14 days of grace where you can go to the ‘recoverable items’ folder and save items removed from your deleted folder, but after that, it’s really gone.

But the accidental delete is probably the least concerning. Even in the world of O365 there still exists the prevalent threat of Malware, either originating on the end-user device or within an email itself. Within seconds this can attack the contents of your mailbox deleting items or rendering your inbox inaccessible.

There is also the risk of end-users intentionally, permanently deleting their emails either with good intentions of tidying things up or as a malicious act when exiting the business, both of which could lead to the business losing critical information.

How do you back-up O365 Mailboxes, SharePoint, OneDrive & Teams

Whereas there is no option within O365 to recover mailboxes and shared documents to a particular point in time, the good news is that there are many tools available that allow you to connect to O365 and take full and partial back-ups of each user’s account.

At Thrive we make this even easier by providing a fully managed service to protect your O365 environment. We leverage what we believe to be the best solution on the market from Veeam to comprehensively back-up your O365 mailboxes to our secure cloud and also an option to back-up items residing in SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams. We are able to configure this service to your Recovery Point and Recovery Time objectives and then provide you with the peace of mind that everything is safe.

We provide this as a ‘Backup-as-a-Service’ offering where you pay a small monthly fee per active mailbox backed-up regardless of its size or required retention period. We also provide the option to back-up your collective SharePoint sites, OneDrive and Teams folders and base the cost of this service on the capacity required. To help you work out the cost for protecting your O365 environment, we have produced a simple online calculator that enables you to understand the options available.

In the meantime, if you have any questions regarding backing up your O365 mailboxes or your wider applications and data environment, contact us today.