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The Cloud Backup Myth & Office 365

“I don’t need to backup my emails, because I use a cloud service like Office 365, G Suite.”

Sadly, that’s the number one myth we hear about Office 365, and believe me it absolutely is a myth. By default, Office 365 and G Suite do not backup email data, only provide a deleted items box.

Microsoft doesn’t have you covered. Based on their ‘Microsoft Service Agreement (Sec.6b), in the event of an outage, they do not guarantee retrieval of your content or data that you have stored. They recommend a regular backup solution to cover this gap.

Lets deep dive into 2 scenarios for more context….

Scenario A – The majority of businesses

Scenario A, is unfortunately, where most businesses sit and where the majority of data loss is present. Inexperienced business owners and IT support firms sign up to a cloud platform like Office 365 or G Suite and do not take into consideration security and redundancy of their crucial email data. By default, Office 365 is setup to send and deliver emails, nothing more, nothing less.

A true story example which sadly, occurs far too often. John Smith signs his business up for an Office 365 account and starts sending emails. John receives an email from a hacker with a crypto locker link embedded into the content of the email. John then clicks the link and the crypto locker ransomware virus starts encrypting all John’s documents and emails. By the time John realises ALL his emails are now gone and its too late. John logs into the Office 365 portal to restore his emails and is shocked to realise there isn’t an option to do so.

Scenario B – The Ideal Solution (We like to call it the Wagga IT Solution, but we are biased)

Scenario B entails careful planning and executing to ensure data integrity, confidentiality and availability is met. Wagga IT’s formula for Office 365 ensures all data is backed up daily (hourly in special situations) in Australia, all emails securely sent through a third party firewall, email auditing enabled, 2FA authentication setup and above industry standard password policy setup. All these industry standard practices setup seamlessly before you even receive your first email!

So what now?

It’s quite common for Managed Service Providers to setup their customers identical to Scenario A and it’s almost impossible for the client to identify these simple issues until its too late.

Wagga IT provides external audits for customers to identify these issues before it’s too late. In some situations an external audit is required due to the availability and laziness of customers existing Managed Service Provider.

As a final note, ask yourself, How much do you value your email data?