Cloudbusting – Office 365 and Backup

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“I’m sure Microsoft backup all our Cloud data…” Let’s investigate that shall we?

“In the Cloud”, it’s become a phrase that means anything not on your premises. It is of course so much more than that, and now means all sorts of services, storage and ways to connect between locations. Microsoft have been in the forefront of that for many years, and for the majority of Businesses Office 365 is the product they know about and use.

But how did the Business get there? and have they got some backup and recovery methods?

In the last 10 years there has been a ‘Gold Rush’ to the Cloud

We’ve seen a lot of businesses end up with their data shovelled onto some remote storage, regardless of the fact that their Broadband was a slow old connection which suddenly had to cope with multiple users downloading and uploading data all day long. That’s a fast track to Frustrationville, calling in at Disappointment Junction and Why-did-we-do-this Parkway.

LETS SECURE YOUR DATA IN THE CLOUD

A Lesson in Data Protection and Responsibility

A Business called

A Business called us in a panic a couple of years ago, having just been migrated to Office 365 by another IT company. They were in a rural location, running a 2Mb/s ADSL Broadband connection with multiple users. Ouch. Suffice to say their experience of file sharing over this low bandwidth with painful; and they wanted to return to local Server storage.

Hidden Risks of controlling Your Own IT

Maybe things have now improved. That customer has an upgraded Broadband that can cope with the data flow and have just carried along with it all. They parted company with the original IT provider of the Cloud solution and are left managing their own Office 365. This has bumbled along for years, with no-one noticing that when a user left 6 months ago they deleted some important data which had gone unnoticed until now. It is to do with a big customer, and some contract files that needs checking. “Say where did those files go?”

A Costly Lesson in Cloud Data

“I’m sure Microsoft have a backup. Give them a call” said the MD confidently (he’s obviously never tried to call Microsoft before). An underling has the task of contacting Microsoft about their Office 365 and this SharePoint thing they have the files in. A Web chat ensues with a helpful Microsoft Technician, who points out that Microsoft do not backup customers’ data directly, only in ‘versioning’ on documents – where you can recover a document from a point-in-time that is its last version (going back to around 32 versions if that is configured). It won’t help with deleted folders and files.

Hidden Costs of Skipping Backup Services

The poor underling reports back to the MD, who is understandably upset. The previous IT company are called to check about backup, and thereby ensues a “he-said, she-said” type conversation regarding budgets and “did they really need that annual backup fee?” in the original quotes, which got struck off to keep them happy and agree the deal…

Data Protection 101

The moral of this Story is…never assume your data is backed up…anywhere. CHECK, and make sure you have multiple backup methods. The value of your data and the cost of losing your data is many times more than the value of a regular cost of backup Services.