Imagine this all-too-common scenario: someone in accounting receives a large invoice by email and pays it. It’s several months before you discover that the invoice originated from a compromised or spoofed email account, that your vendor never received the funds, and that you’re now obligated to provide the FBI with evidence for a criminal investigation.

How long would it take you to locate the suspicious communications? Especially if they’d been deleted months before?

As business email compromise and spear phishing attacks grow in sophistication, we’re seeing more of these unfortunate scenarios, but we also regularly encounter less dramatic circumstances in which our clients discover an urgent need for backups of emails or files —backups that may be easy or impossible for them to find, depending on the recovery solution they’ve set up beforehand.

Whether these incidents are minor glitches or will result in a devastating loss is entirely contingent upon the quality of the backup solution your business has in place.

You Need to Know: Office 365 does not include full or automatic backup

More than half of today’s businesses—and over a billion users—have come to rely on Microsoft Office 365, and for good reason. Office 365 enables employees to access email, files and familiar applications (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) from any device, at any location, at any time of day or night. It supports collaboration, increases productivity, and boosts efficiency.

And it’s reliable. With uptime averaging over 99.98% for the past two years, Microsoft’s infrastructure is highly resilient and the applications that reside there are well protected against crashes, outages and service interruptions.

The common misconception—one we’ve seen time and time again—is that this reliability extends to full data backup. In fact, backup capabilities are  not included with Office 365.  Microsoft support staff can sometimes restore items outside of their normal retention periods, but this is not guaranteed.

Microsoft’s responsibility is for their own infrastructure, not your data. Their job is to ensure the always-on availability of Office 365 software applications, to guarantee that their data centers and the servers that reside there are protected against power and hardware failures, and to maintain the security of the services they provide. They do not guarantee the protection and long-term retention of your data.

Office 365’s limited data retention capabilities are inadequate for most business needs

Office 365’s data retention policies are designed primarily to protect data that’s actively in use. These policies are complex, multifaceted and ever-changing. Managing and monitoring them can be difficult, even for seasoned professional system administrators. It’s not uncommon to discover after the fact that much-needed items thought to have been saved are in fact permanently gone.

And these data retention policies are often inadequate for the real-world scenarios in which businesses need to recover previously-deleted data. On average, a data breach will be discovered more than 140 days after the initial compromise. Or consider the slow pace of litigation: it can take months if not years for courts to issue subpoenas.

Microsoft does offer a litigation hold feature designed for immutable data retention. However, it is not meant to act as a backup.  The interface for retrieving data through a litigation hold is cumbersome if used for backup and restoration needs.  Also, it does not provide a dedicated physical location for the backed-up data.

None of Office 365’s built-in capabilities offer the kind of robust backup solution that will allow your organization to recovery fully and quickly in case you’re victimized by ransomware, a phishing attack or an internal security threat.

Why Veeam Backup for Office 365?

When Red Level needed to ensure that customers moving to Office 365 had a truly comprehensive and reliable backup and recovery capabilities, they turned to a longtime partner they knew they could trust. For more than eight years, Red Level has partnered with Veeam on a multitude of projects, starting with virtualization backups and extending to full-system solutions.

We know what local businesses need: backup solutions that are simple to use, effortless to deploy and amply supported. With Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365, your data is protected against accidental deletion, security threats, and retention policy gaps. Industry-leading recovery flexibility means that restorations are quick and easy. And it’s simple to meet legal and compliance requirements with efficient eDiscovery of Office 365 backup archives.

Your business’s data can be backed up as often as needed—weekly, daily, or even every five minutes—and stored in native file format or an archive database.

Full snapshots of Office 365 Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive data can be saved to Red Level’s highly secure Mi-Cloud data center, and hybrid deployments can be handled with ease. Full restoration requires nothing more than a few simple clicks.

To learn more about Veeam Backup for Office 365 and other low-fuss, high-reliability backup solutions available through Red Level, contact us today.