Ensuring your Office 365
environment is protected
With cloud technology
becoming more popular
among technology leaders,
it is easy for data to get lost
among the hype. Michael
Gogos, Product Manager,
Quest Data Protection, offers
some top tips to protecting
Office 365 environments
and bolstering backup and
recovery processes.
s more organisations leverage
A
cloud to collaborate and
ensure Business Continuity and
productivity, Microsoft 365, particularly,
is gaining traction as the productivity
platform of choice. Organisations and
users therefore need to feel confident
their systems and data are protected in
this environment.
While Microsoft Office 365 offers a
number of system availability and data
protection capabilities, data can still
be damaged or lost based on several
unforeseen situations.
Here are some tips to bolster Office 365
backup and recovery processes:
Take control
SaaS applications, and the cloud
in general, is just as susceptible to
outages and recovery challenges as
traditional on-premises data centres.
This includes infrastructure failures
or accidental mistakes, to purposeful
malicious attacks. To help mitigate,
IT teams should perform their own
Office 365 backups. Maintain multiple
copies of your backups on different
devices and locations as this is one of
your best defences against malicious
attacks. Performing your own Office
365 backup allows the business to
restore business-critical data to another
location or system, including an onpremises
resource. This makes it easier
to help reduce the risk of business
downtime, keeps productivity in-check
and protects your brand.
Familiarise yourself with
retention policies
Office 365 offers retention policies
but be sure to read the fine print. Not
all are considered long-term data
retention required by various compliance
regulations. Also, retention policies
don’t protect data that is accidentally
or maliciously changed. To bolster
your Office 365 backup and recovery
footprint, turn to third-party solutions that
support a 3-2-1 backup strategy – one
that allows the business to have multiple
copies of data on separate devices and
in different locations. This will give you
the protection you need and the ability
to recover changed, damaged or deleted
files or data. Additionally, there is no limit
to how long you choose to retain your
data, making it easier to meet necessary
compliance requirements.
Don’t use data availability groups
for individual mailbox backup
and restore
Every mailbox database in Office 365
is hosted in a database availability
group (DAG) and replicated to
geographically dispersed data centres
within region. Although every mailbox
database has four copies, one of these
copies is configured as a lagged copy,
making it vulnerable to human error or
malicious attacks. Find a solution that
gives IT teams a granular level view of
recovery options that provides them
with the power to restore data – such
as entire mailbox, individual emails
and email attachments – when and
where they want.
Understand the value of your
Office 365 data
Often, it is not only the files or emails
that are important, but also the context
and connections these emails and files
have to other data. This is where the
true business value in Office 365 comes
from. Consider Microsoft Teams, which
has quickly become one of the most
popular productivity and connectivity
applications used by organisations.
Teams allows co-workers to share and
collaborate on documents and wikis
and communicate across chat and
video meetings. Protecting just the
individual documents or chat records
without the surrounding context of the
team structure, connections and history,
means that the business value of that
context is unprotected. u
intelligent CLOUD SECURITY
www.intelligentciso.com | Issue 29
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