In 2023, there were nearly 94,000 cybercrime reports—up by 23% from the previous year—according to the Australian Signals Directorate Cyber Threat Report 2022-2023. The report iterated a range of malicious cyber actors that showed intent and capability to compromise a business’ vital systems, and Australian networks were regularly targeted by both opportunistic and more deliberate malicious cyber activity.
To fight data theft and business disruption, organisations must protect and back up their critical data. As a result of organisations storing much of their data in Microsoft 365 cloud, Microsoft 365 Backup was released. Microsoft’s goal with this new offering is to provide immutable backup protection for businesses against data destruction attacks, self-service backup and restore options, and adherence to Microsoft 365 security and trust coverage.
Now available in public preview, Microsoft 365 Backup offers in-place solutions with lightning-fast restorability from Microsoft to ensure business continuity. You can back up and restore data from services like OneDrive, SharePoint, Exchange, and Teams. Previously, most customers would use a third-party tool to back up data from these services, but now Microsoft has released a solution that you can use to back it up natively. And this is something that many of our clients at Professional Advantage clamour for.
With Microsoft 365 Backup, you can:
- Shield your organisation’s data from ransomware attacks and accidental deletions.
- Back up and restore all or select SharePoint sites, Exchange mailbox, and OneDrive to ensure the safety of your essential data.
- Easily identify what needs restoration and restore content from backups with the desired granularity.
- Monitor changes and restoration activities while maintaining control over storage usage.
During our recent Cloud & Infrastructure BTO (Business Time Out), our Senior Cloud & Infrastructure Consultant, Paris Wells, answered some of our internal team’s high-level questions about Microsoft 365 Backup. Listen to our short discussion in this recording:
Alternatively, you can read the summary here:
How do you estimate your costs on Microsoft 365 Backup?
Microsoft recommend that utilise their calculator on this web page. You then use this calculator when you go into the tenant’s storage usage in the back end and you can get the total usage of their OneDrive, SharePoint, and mailboxes.
Where is the storage located?
You set up the Synapse relationship, which is how it stores all the data into Azure. By giving it an Azure subscription, it creates all the storage for you in the back end. It’s all automatic, and you specify the mailboxes and OneDrive that you want to backup, and it is all native in the back end. You don’t control any of the Azure storage in that regard.
Can you choose the region you’re saving?
No. That is all done at the subscription level. It doesn't let you go and choose the storage, you just give it a subscription, enable the backups, and then it is all automatic.
Are there any downsides of Microsoft 365 Backup?
The only downsides at the moment are that their retentions are only one a year. You can't really change much, I'm guessing because it is a brand new product, so you can't go longer than a year and you can't change when it snapshots either.
It snapshots every 15 minutes, and your mailboxes and SharePoint go up to a year. If you want anything longer than that I think they are pushing you to use eDiscovery and the retention hold.
You have to manually add new users and SharePoint sites. You can do group membership at the start to get all the users, but if someone gets added to that later, you have to go in and add that new user manually.
Back up your data in Microsoft 365 now!
Don’t leave the safety of your critical data in Microsoft 365 to chance; get Microsoft 365 Backup now. It is available for purchase from Tier 1 CSPs, such as Professional Advantage, starting at USD 0.15 per GB per month. Please contact us to request your personalised quote or book your demo to see how it works.
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