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Office 365 offers many security features for the protection of your data. It has multiple advanced threat protection safeguards that protect your office 365 data from external threats like emails bringing the hidden spyware or malware, URLs, and downloadable tools. The Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) includes:
Reports: Several real-time reports to give you the results of ATP policies.
Threat Protection Policies: The policies define and set the appropriate security level to protect your organization’s data.
Threat investigation and response capabilities: The usage of cutting-edge tools to check, understand, remove, and report the threats.
Automated investigation and response capabilities: it automates the investigations of the threats and saves time in handling the threats.
When you know that Office 365 has all the adequate number of security features for the protection of your business data, then your natural reaction would be for not taking the backup. But there are many reasons that compel you to rethink your decision and allow you to take Office 365 backup.
Shared-responsibility model
Microsoft provides the shared-responsibility model for the security of the Office 365 account. It means the user and Microsoft both share the responsibility for the resources. Microsoft handles hardware, network, virtualization, applications, and Operating System whereas the User is responsible for the control, access, and management of data. The shared-responsibility model puts the whole accountability of the user data on the user itself. So, if you lose your data, then you are responsible for it.
To access the mailbox data of an account, it needs to remain in the active state. It means, if any of your employee resigns from your organization and the account became inactive, then others will not be able to access the mailbox data. If an employee had important files saved in the mailbox, then the files will be lost if the account becomes inactive. So, if you are not taking the backup of the account before it goes inactive, then you may lose the data forever.
Microsoft’s Backup and Retention Policies
The retention policies of all the applications in Office 365 are different. SharePoint and OneDrive are used for all the collaboration and retention period for deleted objects in these applications in 93 days. But the restore procedure and time taking, so the retention policy does not provide any guarantee that it will help in the effective recovery in case the data gets corrupt or gets deleted.
Exchange Online has a different approach to the retention policy. If any data gets deleted by the user, then it goes to the Deleted Items Folder. If the user hard deletes the data, then it further goes to the ‘Recoverable items’ folder where the retention period is of 14 days. Although, the user can choose to increase the retention period up to 30 days. So, there are multiple issues related to the backup and retention policies of the Office 365 applications:
- Each Service and application has a different backup and retention policy for the deleted items. And Microsoft Teams does not have any kind of safeguard policy to save its data.
- Microsoft may change the retention policy and so you will have to update your information to adjust to the policies.
- The backup and retention policies only work in a limited manner and cannot remove the need for any professional backup application.
Strict regulatory compliances
If your organization is related to the any of the regulated sector like law, finance, healthcare, etc. then you need to keep your emails, contacts, attachments, and another kind of information saved for a very long period as per the guidelines of the HIPPA, GDPR, etc. Because the backup policies of Office 365 offer a very limited backup, and so you need the assistance of the professional backup software.
When you have learned much about the limitation of the backup & retention policies, then you should also learn about the best tool that will take the backup of Office 365 account for you.
Kernel Office 365 Backup & Restore is a one software that can take the backup of any Office 365 mailbox associated with any plan of Office 365. The backup file format will be a PST file that will save the Office 365 mailbox data in the full hierarchy just like it was saved in the Office 365. Similarly, Kernel Migrator for SharePoint allows you back up SharePoint (on-premises & Online) and OneDrive for Business data to your system.
