Microsoft Office 365 is the most popular and widely used business productivity suite. Currently, 23 million people and businesses are using Office 365 for performing their daily tasks and assignments. The reason why it is so popular resides in its remote accessibility. By using Office 365, users can work online, can share spreadsheets, documents and other files with their colleagues from home as well from mobile devices

By this, there is no harm in regarding it to be the multi-purpose business cloud. It is indeed reshaping the conventional business practices. For instance, did we ever think of a service where business dealings will be just a click away? Did we ever think about a way to collaborate with far-flung project teams without even leaving our workstations?

All these aspirations have come to realization with the introduction of Office 365. This is just a glimpse of what Office 365 do and obviously, there is a list long briefing on services and features of Office 365. For the sake of simplicity and conciseness, it can very well be said that Office 365 is indeed a future of tomorrow’s businesses and it must be employed as it caters to all possible types of corporate scenarios.

Overview of MS Office 365 Backup and Recovery

It is important to note that Office 365 offers inbuilt data protection services. Its online services provide a very staunch service level agreement and guarantee 99.9% of uptime. Its backup and restore functionalities are capable of addressing certain application downtime situations such as data center outage.

However, with the globally spread infrastructure of Microsoft, they have enacted multiple data centers all over the world. These multiple data centers enable them to host a state-of-the-art redundant network architecture. If due to any technical or non-technical reason, one data center experiences any shutdown, other data center will act as the backup data center.

Microsoft’s Database Availability Group (DAG) makes sure that users will always stay accessible to their email files, backup data, online recycle bin, and site collections data. Moreover, it also ensures the protection of Exchange Online SharePoint. In addition to this, Office 365’s enterprise packages use data loss prevention and eDiscovery methodologies to make sure that the client’s business stays compliant with the regulatory duties.

In general Office 365 backup solution provides support in almost every incident pertaining to data loss. However, the following are some of the cases where the scope of Office 365 backup tool gets limited:

• If the user accidentally deletes an Office 365 data file and closes the application.
• Deletion or corruption of any important file by the disgruntled employee.
• Deletion of Office 365’s data through some unauthorized access to the company’s data.

Apart from these situations, backup for Office 365 is quite a handy tool when it comes to backing up the Office 365 mailboxes and recovery of deleted items.

Common Misconceptions and their Clarification

There has been a lot of misconceptions pertaining to Office 365. A lot of people take it just like a newer version of Office 2016, whereas others consider it solely as a business suite. But in reality, it is basically a blend of these two considerations. The following are some of the clarifications pertaining to the backup nature of Office 365.

A lot of people ask if Office 365 is really a backup utility for Office applications? In simpler words, no, it does not offer full fledge backup services. But as a platform, Office 365 offers extreme data protection. However, retention policy gives it somewhat an impression of backup supported application. With the retention policy, users may recover their deleted Office 365 files within the 30 days of deletion. Microsoft SharePoint Online’s data is backed up after every 12 hours and for this, the retention period is just 14 days.

Now the next question arises that if it does not offer classic backups then how Office 365’s data can be backed up and will it make business more compliant with the regulations? First of all, there are a lot of Office 365 backup solutions in the market. The choice of relevant one depends on the area of application where it is supposed to be enacted. Secondly, if a business is of nature where crucial data will be handled, then there is a mandatory regulatory condition of performing data backups. There are a lot of Office 365 business solutions that can let companies retain email data for as long as the user wants. Furthermore, the user can also tailor retention preferences to meet compliance requirements. It must be noted that apart from backups, constant availability of the data is the key compliance requirement for many standards like GDPR.

The next misconception is related to the amount of data that will be recovered. For this, users should stay assured that irrespective of the document size, whatever will they specify to be backed up, will be recovered whenever required. For instance, Veeam Backup for MS Office 365 supports data backups for MS SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, and MS Exchange Online. It is not the only one, there are plenty of other Office 365 backup solutions too. Features and device compatibility are some of the domains where difference exists.

After this, there exists a very common misconception that asks if running a third-party backup service, makes their Office 365 run abnormally? Basically, backups run in the background and the whole process will be so streamlined and smooth that users won’t even notice backups to be happening.

Another great thing about Office 365 backups is their versatile flexibility. Users can restore the data in the form they want. Whether data is related to Office 365 mailbox, a PST file, email attachment or an on-premises exchange mailbox, everything will be backed up and restored on demand.