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How Can You Safeguard Against Data Loss in Office 365?
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Office 365 Data Loss

It is a myth that Microsoft will protect you from data loss in Office 365. Microsoft is incrementally ensuring a reliable service, but the data within your Office 365 tenant is your responsibility. However, it cannot protect you from Office 365 data loss at your end – due to malware, human error or malicious intent.

This article contains:

YOU have the onus of protecting Office 365 data

As per Compliance Laws

As per governance laws like the GDPR, HiPAA, SOX, and many others, protecting your customer’s data is a responsibility that is shared between the controller (your organization) and the processor (third-party service providers like SaaS platforms). Moreover, in the event of a data breach or data loss, “shared accountability” and “joint liability” is mandated.

Need another reason? Compliance laws also insist on the organization having “the ability to restore the availability and access to personal data in a timely manner in the event of a physical or technical incident”. What that means, is that they mandate that you have a solution or capability to accurately backup and restore data.

As per your Cloud Service Provider

Office 365 Data LossMicrosoft provides a highly reliable service with Office 365, but they themselves recommend backup in their service agreement, “We strive to keep the Services up and running; however, all online services suffer occasional disruptions and outages, and Microsoft is not liable for any disruption or loss you may suffer as a result. In the event of an outage, you may not be able to retrieve Your Content or Data that you’ve stored. We recommend that you regularly backup Your Content and Data that you store on the Services or store using Third-Party Apps and Services” 

Do not be mistaken – your data in Office 365 is your responsibility!

Ways data loss occurs in Office 365

Human Error: Office 365  has not yet reached the maturity where it can decipher intent when all the rules of the service are followed. We are talking about accidental deletions of data by parties with no ill-intent – plain human error. According to Aberdeen Group, research shows that 70% of all data loss is accidental.

Malware: Then there are malicious actors such as hackers, ransomware, and malware that can cause massive data loss. While there is so much you can do to fully prevent these attacks, these do happen and you need countermeasures.

And don’t forget about the disgruntled employee causing data loss by malicious intent!

Office 365 backup

Office 365 outages do happen

Service in the cloud means 99.9% uptime. In the first few months of 2019 alone, Office 365 has suffered two major outages. The second outage dated 28th January 2019 was a massive two-day outage

Another Microsoft outage caused data loss where Microsoft deleted several Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) databases in Azure, holding live customer information. 

We are talking no email access, no customer emails, no spreadsheets, no presentations – Basically bringing your enterprise to a halt. Can you quantify the financial loss in having your data unavailable or lost for that long? 

What about native Office 365 archives

Office 365 offers short preset retention periods for deleted emails and deleted items in OneDrive. However, they hold data only for a limited period of time, do not backup regularly (your data will be outdated), and restoring data from may be cumbersome. Such options are more of an archival mechanism than a true backup and restore solution.

So how do you safeguard against Office 365 data loss?

So now that you know that your data in Office 365 needs dependable protection against data loss, what should you do? Select a 

Cloudally provides a safe (ISO 27001 certified, GDPR, and HIPAA compliant), secure (Amazon S3 Secure Storage and AES-256 Encryption) and flexible cloud backup solutions for Office365, Sharepoint and OneDrive, We were also ranked #1 under best business tool category by Newsweek by over 10,000 IT Pros. We offer a full-featured 15-day free trial which you can activate and start backing up your data in minutes and are very highly rated and recommended by our users.

Contact us to have an expert guide you as you navigate the waters of data protection to achieve a reliable and secure enterprise.

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