If you haven’t tuned into the Office365Distilled podcast, you should! Hosted by Marijn Somer and Steve Dalby – two highly experienced (and witty) Office 365 and SharePoint consultants “who can be risque or just plain rude” (their words, not mine!). We spent an insightful 30 minutes talking about Microsoft Office 365 data loss, backup, and recovery which then culminated with their traditional whisky tasting. Here are some excerpts from our chat.
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Microsoft 365 Data Loss Happens
Steve: Well, I have to admit that in 20 years in this game and since 15 when Microsoft went in the cloud or whatever the numbers, I have never ever had a third party backup tool.
Murray: You know what, Steve? I was listening to your your podcast. It was last week, and I heard you say, “I didn’t know that Microsoft recommended it”. A lot of people don’t know that Microsoft and and for that matter, Salesforce, Google. They all recommend a third party backup because they don’t back it up.
Marjin: I’ve had a customer where something technically went wrong and they could set something back that was a week old or something like that, and that didn’t help us very much. And then another case where we had some people deleting stuff and then, people figured that out way too late. So that didn’t work very well. And of course I had a few migrations that went wrong as well.
Murray: I had a classic myself. I synced up my phone, my new phone, and this is it – people don’t think about this, they always think about, ransomware, and all these kind of exotic things. But I was syncing my new phone years ago and I did it wrong and it started deleting my entire Gmail inbox. Luckily I was backing it up with CloudAlly, so I was able to recover it, but honestly it was kind of scary because I literally watched my mails disappear. But, yeah, I know what happens. It really does happen. People either maliciously or accidentally delete data. I’ve seen some really bad “angry employee” situations where they’ve deleted thousands of Salesforce records and I work with those kind of situations personally in CloudAlly So yeah, it happens. It’s real.
If you’re a company, you’ve got employees and you’ve got legal requirements and possibly compliance requirements. You can’t say, “I lost it!” GDPR’s Article 32 says you’ve got to be able to present that data on request. You can’t say you lost it. So, yeah, it’s a big market. It’s a huge market, actually.
Backup is Not Disaster Recovery But Ensures Business Continuity
Murray: No, we’re not disaster recovery. That’s not what we do or any of our competitors do. And I really try to correct people, we’re business continuity. Microsoft, they have something called a Shared Responsibility Model. Yeah, not just Microsoft. Anybody has that? That’s a cloud service provider. It means they’re responsible for the infrastructure. You, the end customer or the MSP, are responsible for the data. It’s standard. So they do take care of disaster recovery. You’ve got to take care of business continuity in the event of accident or malicious data loss with backup.
Email is dying. What about protecting my Teams Chats?
Steve: We’ve been talking about files backup and restore all, but what about all my group chats and my conversations and all the other things like?
Murray: This is a great question and the reason I say it’s a great question is because everybody uses Teams. And the thing that freaks me out about it, personally, is that I’ve got people contacting me in around the world saying, “What kind of price can you give me on this deal? How can we close this deal?” And they’re trying to pin me down on offers, right? Quotes for the Sales Team on Teams. I tell them, “Send me an e-mail. I want an audit trail of this discussion.” We all have business-critical information on Teams. And yeah, one of the most common questions we get now is, “Do you guys back up chats? Teams?” Yes, we backup Teams. We backup channels, conversations, metadata, calendars, sites, all of the stuff in Teams. But. And we back up the Teams conversation. So when we were passing links earlier before the the call started, on Teams, we backed that up. But private chats between, let’s say, Steve, you and me, right, there’s a couple of issues with data privacy. That we don’t do. We don’t backup individual chats, but everything else on Teams we do.
Arrack Gives Stiff Competition to Whiskey
Enough Said!
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