Microsoft 365 is going from strength to strength and has shown continual growth over the last decade. With such a strong focus on cloud-based solutions these days, it makes sense that most businesses are leveraging some area of the Microsoft 365 offering. By far, the most used facility is ‘Exchange Online’, the hosted email solution.
Microsoft 365 Does Not Include Backup
However, many people are under the impression that their email is completely backed up simply by using email on Microsoft 365, but this is not the case. While it is completely fair to say that the email system is very robust with varying levels of redundancy built it to minimise downtime and outages, this does not protect you against everything. For example, accidental, or even deliberate deletions of email. Sure, there is a 'Recycle Bin' that will retain that email for a period of time, but if you are not aware that the email has been deleted, it will eventually be purged from that 'Recycle Bin' and will not be retrievable after that. While it may not have happened to date, there is also the risk of some significant issue happening within Microsoft that results in mass data loss. With this in mind, it is wise to not have all eggs in the one basket.
Retention Is Different To Backup
It is important to note that some Microsoft 365 subscriptions do have unlimited retention policies and litigation hold facilities, but these are by no means a ‘backup’. They are difficult to manage, and even more difficult to recover mail from unless you know specific details about the missing mail, such as the sender, or the time\date it was deleted. If you cannot provide a lot of detail on the email in question, recovering the email will likely be a time consuming and costly exercise. In addition to that, you are still reliant on Microsoft’s own environment.
Backup Your Microsoft 365 Data To The Sentrian Cloud
To protect yourself fully, Sentrian suggest utilising a third-party tool to backup your Microsoft 365 data to another location. We have been partnered with Veeam for many years now, due to them being the Global Leader in backups for Virtual and Cloud environments and have successfully deployed the Veeam 365 Backup facility for many of our clients.
Veeam monitors every mailbox and backs up the entire contents every day. Even if the user deletes a piece of email as soon as it arrives, or as soon as they send it, this will still be captured in the 'Recycle Bin', backed up, and safely stored in Sentrian’s data centre. Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 has powerful, easy to use search facilities built in that make recovery of email incredibly simple and fast.
In the most recent update to Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, we can now give end users (specified by you) access to the portal to recover email yourself or to monitor email activity of other staff if required.
But wait, there is more! Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 can also backup your Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive data all with the same single ‘per user’ license.
Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 licence is charged per user per month. A license will be required for any ‘Shared Mailboxes’ you need backed up as well. In addition to this, you simply pay for the backup storage you need. The backup storage is ‘tenant wide’ as opposed to ‘per user’. For example, an office with 10 mailboxes, each mailbox holds around 5GB, it will be a total of 50GB backup storage.
If a user leaves the company, assuming you wish to keep the final backup of that mailbox, you will continue to pay the minimal fees for backup storage, however, you will not be required to maintain the Veeam license.
Please contact your Client Services Manager if you are interested in improving your email retention or would like to discuss this in more detail.