The Shared Responsibility Model: Microsoft Office 365 Backup Gaps

Ethan McConnell, Vice President, Technical Consulting Services, Olive+Goose, LLC. Ethan serves as the Vice President for Technical Consulting & Managed Services at Olive+Goose, LLC. His technical specialties include; cloud compliance and security, Office 365, e-mail compliance and data loss prevention, to name a few. Prior to joining Olive+Goose, LLC, Ethan worked 12 years at Microsoft where he held a variety of technical sales roles including Senior Productivity Cloud Architect.

We all know that in today’s modern business environment, your data is one of your most valuable assets. However, it’s all too common for companies to be unprepared for worst case scenarios. While Microsoft and Google provide excellent, reliable cloud services, they explicitly do not take responsibility for protecting your user data.

Microsoft operates on a Shared Responsibility Model – Microsoft delivers applications, the hardware and infrastructure to support those applications, and the network connections that give you that access. When it comes to user data however, Microsoft acknowledges that the responsibility is shared between themselves and your organization. Microsoft is your partner in the following key areas of Office 365:

1. Data center security – both physical and network based
2. Data storage, replication and redundancy
3. Uptime guarantees and privacy controls their core tenets (“if we can’t protect the people, we don’t deserve their trust”) of the Microsoft security approach
4. Protection from major events affecting their data centers such as hardware or software failures, natural disasters, power outages, Operating System errors, etc.

Although Microsoft provides very powerful tools for communication and collaboration, they do not provide strong backup capability for the safety and security of user data. Third party attacks targeting this valuable data such as ransomware or even internal threats from malicious or inadvertent deletions can prove costly or even crippling.

Cybercrime damages are anticipated to cost businesses and organizations $6 trillion annually by 2021, with ransomware attacks occurring every 14 seconds – that’s a 5 times increase between 2017 to 2021. With ransomware attacks growing more than 350% annually at an average cost of $133,000 per attack on businesses, is your team prepared for the worst-case scenario?

For many, the answer is that they’re not prepared. For others, they’ve sought a solution to the challenge of protecting their users and data, but is that solution going to solve their problem and let them focus on their customers? It isn’t as reliable as they need it to be.

Ensuring your business has the support and reliable backups it needs is essential – you might think that a crisis, whether malicious cyber-attack or otherwise, won’t happen to you, but the statistics say otherwise. Over the past five years, security breaches have increased by 67%¹ and a whopping 73% of businesses are not ready to respond to a cyber-attack. This means around 7 out of 10 businesses are not prepared.

Therefore, at Olive + Goose, we recommend a comprehensive solution that ensures safety for your data in case of cyberattacks or inadvertent data loss. That’s where Backupify comes in, with the ability to back up and restore users from both Microsoft O365 and G-Suite cloud applications. It protects users across all of their Office 365 applications including Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams. Backupify lets you go beyond the 30-90 days of retention provided by your cloud providers, all while giving you and your business access to historical data sets as part of a reliable backup solution. And while Microsoft doesn’t provide you the data protection your business needs, Backupify will ensure your data is not only easily recoverable, but also provides a simple and efficient, non-destructive restoration.

Working in concert with your SaaS provider, Backupify fills in the gaps. Backupify is your strategic solution for the things Microsoft doesn’t cover – human error, hackers and other risks such as accidental or malicious deletion. With an easy to use interface and Datto’s own network of private datacenters, Backupify ensures that no matter what happens, your data is protected and secure.