Do you need Microsoft 365 backup?

The shared-responsibility model

Microsoft guarantees the service is available — but under its shared-responsibility model, your data is your responsibility. Microsoft protects against their infrastructure failing; it does not protect you from the most common ways data actually disappears: someone deletes the wrong thing, a departing employee's mailbox is removed, ransomware encrypts your files, or a bad sync wipes a folder. Once Microsoft's short retention window passes, that data is gone.

What actually puts your data at risk

• Accidental deletion — the #1 cause of data loss, and retention windows are shorter than people think.
• Ransomware and malware — can encrypt OneDrive and SharePoint files, which then sync everywhere.
• Departing employees — mailboxes and files removed when licenses are reclaimed.
• Compromised accounts — deleting or exfiltrating data before you notice.

What to back up

A complete backup plan covers more than just 365: Exchange email, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams, plus your servers and workstations and your network device configurations. The goal is simple — if anything is lost, encrypted, or deleted, you can restore it quickly from a copy that's separate from the thing that failed.

The 3-2-1 rule

The time-tested standard: keep 3 copies of your data, on 2 different types of media, with 1 copy off-site. Managed offsite backup gives you that last, critical copy — isolated from ransomware and local disasters — and, just as important, someone watching every backup job so you find out before a restore, not during one.

We run managed, encrypted, monitored offsite backups of servers, networks and Microsoft 365. See online backups.