Category: Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 – Why OneDrive Backup is Needed

It is clear that the cloud is replacing physical storage formats due to its collaboration and access features, its cost-effectiveness, and data security and resiliency. As organizations continue to store more and more, cloud storage will continue to increase in popularity. One of the most popular forms of cloud storage used by organizations today is Microsoft OneDrive.

OneDrive is a productivity tool that allows users to synchronize files across different endpoints and share those files with other users in the enterprise. It is one of the several applications that make up the Microsoft 365 suite. The other applications include Exchange, Teams, and SharePoint. OneDrive is designed for users to store and share files, along with other collaboration capabilities that make not only daily jobs easier but also the management of shared files across different team members. The great thing about OneDrive being a cloud storage destination is that it enables employees to access their business files, as well as files shared by other people or teams, from different connected devices. In today’s world of remote working, access flexibility is incredibly useful.

However, along with these valuable benefits, comes one major risk: data loss from a lack of OneDrive backups.

How Microsoft 365 Protects Your Data

Many may be thinking, “If Microsoft is providing the cloud storage, wouldn’t they be responsible for protecting the data in OneDrive?” The answer to that question is “Not exactly.” In the world of software-as-a-service or the SaaS model, data protection is considered a shared responsibility. Though Microsoft does take on the responsibility of application and infrastructure uptime, and it does provide many built-in features that feel like Office 365 backups, none of them really provide what is truly needed when it comes to Microsoft 365 backup and disaster recovery. Actual data protection against site outages, accidental deletion, and ransomware is the end user’s responsibility.

Now, it was mentioned above that Microsoft does have native tools that help with some data protection. These include things like the Recycle Bin, deletion retention policies, and file versioning. In a similar article about Why SharePoint backup is needed. these features are described in greater detail. But at the end of the day, these features only protect you in the short term, and do not truly protect you against data loss.

Lack of Microsoft 365 Backup Leaves You Exposed

Because of this shared responsibility and lack of true built-in data protection features, it is critical that end users perform regular OneDrive backups (and other Microsoft 365 backups). Much like information stored on the internet, there are many threats to your data stored in OneDrive However, due to the shared nature of files in OneDrive, these threats can become even more dangerous.

Accidental Deletion

Because of the synchronization of files in OneDrive, something as simple as an accidental deletion of files becomes much more difficult to recover from. When an end user makes a change to a file (intentional or not), that change is synchronized with local storage on user endpoints, and then faithfully replicated to the OneDrive copy in the cloud. If the file is not backed up, not only is the original file gone for good, but any change is replicated across all connected devices in the cloud.

Malware/Ransomware

Keeping that in mind, you can imagine how disastrous a malware or ransomware attack would be if it were able to access data in OneDrive. Because OneDrive offers its users a straightforward way to sync the work that they have done offline to their storage as soon as they go online, this exposes your IT structures to a greater risk of external threats. Imagine an end user’s endpoint is infected with some form of malware and while offline this malware gets access to this user’s shared OneDrive. This malware may be encrypting or mass-deleting files, and then, when back online these changes are synchronized in the cloud. This malware can then spread further, slowly infecting all of the information, as well as other connected devices that are used to access the OneDrive data. This is even more serious if your company uses a BYOD (“Bring your own device”) model for remote and/or on-site work.

Retrieval of Data from Past Employees

When an employee leaves an organization, and their Microsoft 365 license is relinquished, Microsoft allows 30 to 90 days of time for the organization to migrate the user’s data or store a copy of the OneDrive data in another location, before it is deleted. Oftentimes, in order to recover unused cloud storage, organizations tend to delete unnecessary, redundant or outdated data. Without OneDrive backup in place, there is no way to recover specific files that might not seem important until later in the future

Regulatory Compliance

It is not uncommon for organizations, especially in certain industries, to be subject to several different legal regulations like Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA, or the GDPR. These regulations often dictate details about what type of data will be stored, how it can be gathered, and how long the companies are obligated to retain that data. These regulations also may require a second or backup copy of certain data to be stored at an alternate site. If these organizations fail to hold onto that second copy or cannot produce a certain piece of data when requested, they may face serious legal or regulatory repercussions.

Effective OneDrive Backup and Recovery

All of the above are reasons why organizations are utilizing DPX vPlus for their OneDrive backup. If you are serious about the security of your data stored, shared, and processed in Microsoft OneDrive, and other applications like Exchange, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams, you should give DPX vPlus a try.

If you would like to learn more about DPX vPlus for Microsoft 365, you can request a live demo or even get a 30-day trial copy to try it for yourself. You can also watch a pre-recorded demonstration of vPlus backup and recovery for Microsoft 365. We’ll be happy to help you set things up.

01/27/2023 0 Comments

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Microsoft 365 – Why SharePoint Backup is Needed

SharePoint has been the go-to-service for organizations when it comes to managing large volumes of shared data in the cloud. The SharePoint platform makes sharing of documents amongst teams an easy process, especially since remote team-work has become the norm. Because of this, SharePoint oftentimes contains essential, business data, and this exposes a major gap in the SharePoint on-line platform: risk of data loss if you don’t do Microsoft 365 backups.

Now, if you’ve ever experienced losing a document that wasn’t backed up, imagine how much worse it can be when an organization’s entire SharePoint site at risk! SharePoint does not provide any native backup and restoration features to protect the data contained in it. Data loss in SharePoint can be caused by a number of different factors, accidental or otherwise, including threats from inside and outside of your organization. This is why a SharePoint backup solution is a necessity.

How Microsoft 365 Protects Your Data

Like the other applications in Microsoft 365, SharePoint does provide built-in data protection tools that may feel like SharePoint backup. Features like the Recycle Bin, and the ability to set up retention policies for deleted data can help you restore information that was inadvertently deleted. However, these features have limitations when files are not used on a regular basis and when they have been deleted for a longer period of time.

Recycle Bin

When SharePoint files are deleted, they are moved to the Recycle Bin, where they are stored for 93 days. If an end user were to empty their personal Recycle Bin, the items are transferred to the second-stage Recycle Bin. The second-stage bin is hidden from the end user, only accessible by your Microsoft 365 administrator, and will retain the files for the remainder of the 93 days. Regardless of the Recycle Bin that holds the files, after the 93 days, the files will be purged and cannot be recovered by the administrator. Another important thing to consider is that files in Recycle Bins still count against storage quota. When your total volume of your data exceeds your storage quota, files are removed from the Recycle Bin in order to make space for new items.

Retention Policies

Retention policies including litigation holds, can be applied to an entire SharePoint site to prevent data deletion of any kind. As long as the hold policy is in effect, data in the site cannot be deleted by the user. However, this leaves a vulnerability where rogue administrators, or infected end users with privileged access can still delete items from a site. SharePoint does provide Retention Lock, which will ensure that no one can manipulate an existing retention policy. One thing to keep in mind when considering Retention Lock, is that enabling this feature is an irreversible action. While a site sit in the locked state and no data is being cleaned/deleted, storage space can quickly be consumed, requiring you to purchase additional storage space.

As a SaaS solution, SharePoint functions using a “share responsibility” model when it comes to data protection. This essentially states that Microsoft is responsible for keeping the SharePoint application and the underlying infrastructure running, but Microsoft 365 subscribers are responsible for securing and backup up their own data. If an organization were to suffer a data loss event within the Microsoft 365 cloud, it is up to the organization, not Microsoft, to recover the lost data from their own Microsoft 365 backups

Lack of Microsoft 365 Backup Leaves You Exposed

As mentioned above, SharePoint is a great solution for sharing documents and other crucial information in a collaborative environment. However, since the data is available to be used, modified, and deleted by multiple remote end users, the data can be exposed to several different dangers. However, no matter how severe these dangers are, all of them can be dealt with by simply having a functional SharePoint backup ready to be rolled back in case a serious data loss occurs. Here are some of the worst dangers, which can easily be prevented with a SharePoint backup:

Accidental Deletion

Human error remains the leading cause of most data loss. A user may delete a file by accident, or perhaps overwrite good data with something that is incorrect. Since SharePoint is commonly used for team-related work and utilized by many different employees simultaneously, it is not unusual for data to shift places, or to be removed by someone once it becomes redundant or outdated.

While Microsoft offers features like the Recycle Bin to restore recently deleted data, it is very common for files to be deleted, or data to be overwritten without anyone noticing. Also, data that was once deemed unnecessary, or outdated, may become relevant again in the future. However, restoring such data, which was deleted for a longer time period, is not possible in SharePoint unless you have a third party SharePoint backup in place. Even worse, this type of data is often removed in bulk, which can, in turn, lead to the unintended deletion of large amounts of important information.

Malware/Ransomware

Ransomware represents one of the single biggest threats to SharePoint data. Because data is accessed from several different endpoints, SharePoint is vulnerable to possible malware and ransomware attacks from external sources. If a user accidentally opens an infected link or a file with malware inside, they can infect all of the documents and information stored within SharePoint.

Once ransomware infects a SharePoint site, it can spread to other files, causing them to become encrypted. If this happens, very little can be done to retrieve this data. However, utilizing an external and air-gapped SharePoint backup can be a simply way to restore the effected data back to a point-in-time before the attack occurred.

Internal Threats

Malicious threats of data loss don’t always come from outside the organization. A disgruntled employee, or administrator may take it upon themselves to delete large amounts of data before leaving the organization. They may also empty the Recycle Bin or modify existing retention policies which can make recovery of the data very difficult. Having a SharePoint backup solution with file-level recovery capabilities can easily recover those files to the original location, or even migrate that data to a new owner or a new SharePoint site.

Effective SharePoint Backup and Recovery

SharePoint, as well as the rest of the applications making up the Microsoft 365 suite, provides great value for organizations, especially those working collaboratively from various locations and endpoints. However, Microsoft leaves end users vulnerable to data loss because its native data protection features do not fully protect you from all data loss scenarios. With that in mind, it is imperative that SharePoint users, and Microsoft 365 users in general, utilize a third-party backup solution for those disaster recovery and day-to-day recovery situations.

That is where DPX vPlus comes in. DPX vPlus is a Microsoft 365 backup and recovery solution for SharePoint, Exchange, OneDrive, and Teams. It provides the ability for granular backup and recovery of all aspects of the Microsoft 365 suite. This means that if a SharePoint item, email, contact, calendar item or file is accidentally deleted, modified, or lost, that data can be recovered to its original location, to an alternate user in the cloud, or downloaded locally. A modern, web-based user interface makes administration and backup scheduling simple and efficient. Deduplication, compression and encryption (in transit and at rest), ensures that your data is not only protected, but limits storage requirements and provides a scalable architecture.

If you would like to learn more about DPX vPlus for Microsoft 365 backup, you can request a live demo or even get a 30-day trial copy to try it for yourself. You can also watch a pre-recorded demonstration of vPlus backup and recovery for Microsoft 365. We’ll be happy to help you set things up.

01/19/2023 0 Comments

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Protect Your Microsoft 365 Data with DPX vPlus

We live in a world where data is the new oil. Not only is data valuable for you to maintain and run your business, but if you do not have a plan for data backup and recovery, we can end up paying a high price for it. According to a study by Touche Ross, 90% of businesses without a disaster recovery plan, will fail after a disaster. Meanwhile, more and more critical organizational data is being created, stored, and shared outside of the data center. Oftentimes, this is close to or over 50% of organizational data. This data lives on laptops, tablets, mobile devices and in cloud services, like Microsoft 365. And yet this data can very easily be lost and lost for good without proper Microsoft 365 backup.

Being a SaaS productivity app, Microsoft 365 makes a lot of sense in today’s mobile world. Easy access to documents through the cloud, improved collaboration on project using SharePoint and Teams, and its overall flexibility are just a few of the reasons why adoption of Microsoft 365 continues to rise year after year. However, many organizations believe that moving data to a cloud-based SaaS solution means that data backup is no longer needed – that the provider takes on the responsibility to protect the data. According to a recent Enterprise Strategy Group report, one in four businesses don’t believe they need Microsoft 365 backup. But this is simply not the case, including Sharepoint backup and OneDrive backup.

Microsoft provides what some describe as marginal efforts to protect and backup data, but it does not guarantee complete and fast restores of deleted or corrupted Microsoft 365 data. To put it simply, Microsoft ensures that it won’t lose your data. However, the company doesn’t make any guarantees about recovering it for you. This means that the majority of the burden is placed on the customer.

Now if Microsoft 365 ensures that it won’t lose your data, you may be asking why you would ever need to worry about recovering your data? The answer is that Microsoft’s promises are limited to protection against loss of service due to hardware failure or natural disaster, and short-term protection following user- or admin-error. This means that there are several examples where data loss can occur outside these two areas.

Recovering an email or file that was deleted a long time ago: Microsoft has a 93-day retention policy for both its first and second recycling bins. This means that if a file or email has been deleted for more than 93 days, this file is permanently deleted from that recycling bin and cannot be recovered by Microsoft.
Human Error: This can include any actions like accidently or intentionally deleting important emails or files. Perhaps an employee leaves the company and deletes the contents of his/her mail, attachments, documents, etc. This is especially important when using OneDrive. If a user deletes or modifies a file on their local device, that change, or deletion, is automatically synced with all connected devices.
Ransomware or Malware Attacks: A malware infection, or a ransomware attack can lead to encryption or deletion of your data in Microsoft 365.

With all that in mind, it is essential that you have a third-party Microsoft 365 backup provider to protect against accidental or malicious file deletion, other user errors, ransomware, and data corruption. That is where DPX vPlus for Microsoft 365 backup comes in. Watch this short pre-recorded demonstration of how DPX vPlus provides Microsoft 365 backup and recovery, including Sharepoint backup and Teams backup

DPX vPlus is a Microsoft 365 backup and recovery solution for SharePoint, Exchange, OneDrive, and Teams. It provides the ability for granular backup and recovery of all aspects of the Microsoft 365 suite. This means that if an email, contact, calendar item or file is accidentally deleted, modified, or lost, that data can be recovered to its original location, to an alternate user in the cloud, or downloaded locally. A modern, web-based user interface makes administration and backup scheduling simple and efficient. Deduplication, compression and encryption (in transit and at rest), ensures that your data is not only protected, but limits storage requirements and provides a scalable architecture. When it comes to storage of the backup data, vPlus offers two options. First, a customer can back up to a local file system on the vPlus appliance, or a mounted CIFS or NFS share. Or, if you prefer to keep the cloud data in the cloud, vPlus can even store their Microsoft 365 backup data in an object storage destination like, Azure Blob or AWS S3.

If you would like to learn more about DPX vPlus for Microsoft 365, you can request a live demo or even get a 30-day trial copy to try it for yourself. We’ll be happy to help you set things up.

09/20/2022 0 Comments