How to back up all your Microsoft 365 data safely and cost-effectively

Rogers Business

Many businesses rely on Microsoft 365 now more than ever, making the data it generates more crucial than ever. That’s why it’s so important for that data to be backed up and retrievable. But too many businesses wrongly assume their Microsoft 365 data is already getting backed up, or they’re using legacy solutions that are more costly and less reliable than what’s now available.

Laptop using Microsoft 365

Update: Rogers Business is now Canada’s largest operator partner of Microsoft Teams solutions and is the first provider in the world to offer Teams Phone Mobile and the first Canadian service provider of Operator Connect. Learn more here.

To maintain collaboration and productivity throughout the pandemic lockdown, businesses are relying more heavily than ever—and as a result, also realizing the full potential of—Microsoft 365. This resource is invaluable for remote work, allowing employees to access their email and Microsoft’s suite of familiar programs, including Word, Excel and PowerPoint, from any internet-enabled device. And with the addition of Microsoft Teams, businesses can centralize all their communication needs, allowing employees to create and update documents in real time over chats and virtual meetings, and even over phone calls if Microsoft 365 Business Voice has also been adopted.

With everyone working from home and using Microsoft 365 to collaborate with their colleagues, there isn’t just an increased reliance on what Microsoft 365 can do, but also on the data it generates. What may have once been a sensitive conversation at the office now exists on the internet, and therefore requires a level of security and redundancy it didn’t need before.

Your Microsoft 365 data is your responsibility

Unfortunately, many businesses using Microsoft 365 assume that Microsoft automatically backs up all this data—but that’s not the case. While Microsoft does oversee the infrastructure Microsoft 365 runs on, each customer is responsible for protecting the data they produce with it. That means, there’s an alarming number of businesses doing little or nothing to make sure they can retrieve their Microsoft 365 data should anything happen to it.

On-premises backup solutions come with challenges—during a pandemic or not

But even among those businesses that are backing up their Microsoft 365 data, many of them are using on-premises solutions, which come with several challenges. For one, they’re expensive in terms of money and time, requiring a lot of up-front capital investment in hardware that’s a hassle to maintain—and even then, such equipment can still fail you due to outages, accidents or cybercrime.

Furthermore, on-premises IT infrastructure requires frequent maintenance and upgrades performed by experts. If you have a dedicated IT resource on your team to perform these tasks, you’re potentially compromising their health and the health of others by sending them to your server room so often.

Cloud-based backup is more secure, easier to use and more cost-effective than traditional solutions

Periodic point-in-time backups to a secondary location are crucial in restoring data from the time before it was lost. It’s like copying all the files on your laptop to a new USB stick every night. If one of your files gets corrupted, and you’re not sure when it happened, you can check each of those USB sticks, going to go back to different points in time when the file was not corrupted, and restoring the version you want. This is how a cloud-based backup solution works. It’s available for a monthly subscription and requires no hardware—and therefore none of the costs and hassles that come with it. It’s also a crucial component of any prudent disaster recovery plan.

Cloud-based backup for all your Microsoft 365 data

There now exists a solution specifically for Microsoft 365 data, allowing you to automatically back up an unlimited amount of each user’s data and easily retrieve it through a web-based portal—no agents or software needed. Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 is hosted in an Uptime-Institute Tier III Rogers data centre, providing added security as well as data sovereignty, which means your assets stay only within Canadian legal jurisdiction. These measures are also a great way to close file-retention policy gaps your business may have. There are no egress fees involved and plans are just dollars per month per user.

To learn more about Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, contact a Rogers representative today.