What are the Office 365 Backup Best Practices? Main Pillars Explained!

What is the Need to Protect the Data in Microsoft Office 365?

There are a variety of reasons why organisations need to protect their data in Office 365. A few of these reasons could be to reduce the downtime and disruptions caused to the workflow. This ensures compliance to regulations and more importantly, avoids the loss of important data. The cost of loss of data can be upto million of dollars which would place a huge burden on these organisations and impacting them negatively. By following the Office 365 backup best practices, you can prevent this from happening

Organisations are aware that the data they save in the cloud is never completely safe from data loss which may result due to various different reasons such a malicious activities or just accidental data deletion.

According to the shared responsibility model by Microsoft, Users and Microsoft share the responsibility to secure data. The user has the sole responsibility to ensure that their data is completely recoverable whenever needed. You can do this by taking backups of your important data regularly.

The Pillars Of Office 365 Data Protection

There are several pillars of Office 365 backup best practices that users need to make note of to make their data as secure as possible and prevent loss of data due to any reason. Here are the ways in which you can protect your data:

Making the Data More Secure:

Security is the first point to be noted when it comes to the prevention of data loss in Office 365. Criminals regularly look for vulnerabilities in security that they can target. You can use several tools to prevent this from happening.

• Office 365 built-in security tools

According to the model of shared responsibility, Microsoft is also partially responsible for client protection, The company hence provides built-in security tools that include multi-factor authentication and Microsoft 365 Defender.

1. Microsoft 365 Defender – It is a security suite that is designed to provide protection against breaches of the data. The security suite offers various defences against threats which includes Microsoft Defender, Azure AD, and much more. It also gathers various data to prevent you from attacks in the future.
2. Multi-factor authentication – Office 365 accounts are exposed to credential stuffing despite all the security precautions. This form of cyber attack includes stolen credentials for one account is used to access another account. Unfortunately, many users reuse their old passwords, which can be compromised in many different ways. Due to this, using multi-factor authentication is a must to prevent unauthorised access. There are three multi-factor authentication namely: SMS code, Microsoft authenticator, and a phone call.
3. Firewalls – A firewall is used to defend your data against unauthorised access as it can prevent untrusted traffic from accessing the organisation’s network. It is essential for organisations to set up a reliable and properly configured firewall. By doing this, you can prevent malware from infecting all network devices.

Educating the Users

The second pillar of office 365 backup best practices is educating the users. When it comes to data protection, the organisation’s employees should be a security asset. These users can be additional layers of cybersecurity which would help in keeping the data secure from unauthorised access. Organisations can ensure that users become a strong link to the cybersecurity efforts by training them to recognise any suspicious activities.

Following are the best practices that can help you to maximise the cybersecurity by training users:

1. Identifying what the knowledge gaps are – Organisations can start by recognising what the employees are already aware of and what they need to know. Figuring this out can be done simply by an online survey or can be more complex such as running a simulation to check the awareness of these users.
2. Encouraging collaboration between departments – Collaboration between different departments is one of the office 365 backup best practices that helps in communicating the policy set up by the organisation and to ensure that all the employees are on the same page when it comes to cybersecurity. Departments can work together to introduce the necessary changes to cybersecurity training.
3. Conducting regular trainings – Organisations should consistently schedule regular trainings to greatly enhance the approach towards cybersecurity. Scheduled trainings are very important. It helps employees to refresh their memories on the methods to keep their data safe and also because cybersecurity is constantly changing and advancing.
4. Assigning security roles – Assigning roles to ensure cybersecurity to top managerial positions can prove with added security to the data. These employees are capable of overseeing security related activities and can offer necessary guidance to employees. Hence, you can ensure that the productivity of the entire team increases as well as the security of the data.
5. Collection of employee feedback – Collecting feedback from employees can help organisations improve their training and establish clear communication between each other. The organisation can then incorporate this feedback into future training sessions.

Protection of Data

The third and the most important pillar of office 365 backup best practices is taking backups of the data. Operating without having a backup of the data has major cybersecurity consequences. No matter what the efficiency of your security and education measures are, a single breach can render you organisation to be at risk. To boost an organisation’s efficiency to withstand ransomware and prevent loss of data, you should consider the following steps:

1. Efficiently using storage space – Look for a solution that helps you minimise the amount of storage space required to store your backups. Since your Office 365 data always changes, you can backup only the new and modified files rather than running an entirely new backup. Not only does this help you in maintaining higher storage efficiency, but it also helps in minimising the load on the network.
2. Automation of taking backups – This is one of the office 365 backup best practices that helps users to reduce operational costs and increase productivity. As an organisation grows, it becomes overly complicated to keep track of backups. Hence, adopting backup solution with automation functionality saves a huge amount of time. This helps you redirect your attention to more important work. It is one of the surest ways to avoid errors.
3. Incorporating flexible retention policy – The main issue of relying on Office 365 to protect your data is that it does not offer built in data retention functionality to restore data. This is the reason why you should take your own backups so that you can restore whatever you want to whenever you want. This solution will allow you to keep a number of recovery point and rotate them periodically. This way you will save a lot of space as we can replace the older backups with the newer ones while avoiding any retention policies.
4. Back up the emails – Users should have a backup of all the Office 365 applications such as Outlook, Exchange, and other email accounts.
5. Backup the files that are stored in OneDrive – OneDrive is a cloud storage service in Office 365. You can enable the versioning and retention period in the recycle bin. These features can help users for short term data recovery in some of the cases.
6. Backup the files stored in SharePoint – Sharepoint is a service in Office 365 that allows users to collaborate and manage data among each other. Users should make sure that they have a backup of the lists and libraries in SharePoint to keep them safe.

More Best Practices Users Should Keep in Mind

Here are some more best practices that users can keep in mind

• Calculate the data that users need to protect

Office 365 gives users several features for monitoring the data. It includes the app usage reports that helps them to identify the users that are active and the storage space they are using in the cloud. You should calculate the storage space that can be occupied by user data every week for instance. Then You can use this figure to find out the space that users need on a regular basis to take backups accordingly.

• Backup the Office 365 Data Regularly

You can lose data at any given time. It comes without any warning due to which it is advised that you should backup Office 365 data regularly. If the users in your organisation use Office 365 on a regular basis, you can consider to backup Office 365 daily. When you backup data incrementally, only the data changed is updated in the destination which saves a lot of time and space for your data.

• Following the 3-2-1 rule for Backup

This rule states that you should have at least three copies of the data backed up. You should have two backup copies of  your data stored in different media, and one of the backup should be kept in an offsite location. Users can also use a cloud service to store their data as an offsite backup location. Office 365 is a cloud solution, so you should avoid storing your two copies of backup on OneDrive. You can consider storing Office 365 backups on servers in your workplace or on usb devices that can be detached.

• Configure the Retention Settings

Retention settings is one of the office 365 backup best practices that define how data is kept before the data is permanently deleted. Office 365 provides the retention settings that allows you to store the data items in the recycle bin. The maximum period of retention is 93 days. You can configure the retention settings according to your needs, but you should keep in mind that that the items gets deleted from the recycle bin if it is stored for a prolonged period of time. Due to this limitation, you should consider using the Office 365 backup and recovery tools that has retention settings that are customisable.

• Enabling Versioning

This allows users to preserve the previous versions of SharePoint documents and files on OneDrive after deleting or editing. This feature of Office 365 helps users to recover the corrupt data. Keep in mind that the additional storage is to store multiple versions. You can first check the free space in the Office 365 cloud storage. It has some limitations unfortunately, where it has a limit on the number of versions that users can retain.

• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

When you are dealing with Office 365 permissions, it is very important that you implement RBAC that controls the access to backup the cloud data. is one of the office 365 backup best practices that restricts the access to cloud data. It is very important to restrict the access to only certain users to help minimise the risks of breaches of data. This helps remove all the possibilities of deletion of data that may be intentional or unintentional.

Taking Backups of Your Data Using an Automated Tool

Now the next question that arises when we talk about office 365 backup best practices is how to take reliable backup practices? You can simply use an automated tool which is one of the best in the industry. It is SysTools Office 365 Backup & Restore tool that allows you to backup your data. In case of data loss due to any reason such as theft or cybersecurity issues, you can easily restore from the backup you have taken. You can back up your data by Using a safe and completely automated tool.

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Steps to Backup Your Data

Let us now look at the steps you need to use in order to take back ups of your data:

1. Download the tool and install it.
2. Click on Setup.
3. Now, navigate to the Backup option and select the source as Office 365.
4. Select the Outlook option.
5. Select the categories you want to take the backup for by scrolling down to the Workload option.
6. You can also select the range of dates you want to take the backup for.
7. Enter the Email and Application ID in the source tab.
8. Click on Validate after filling in all the details.
9. Click on the Next option.
10. Select the size of backup you want to take in the Destination tab.
11. Click on validate and then click Next.
12. Go to the Users tab and then Fetch users.
13. Select users to backup the data and you can also choose multiple users at a time.
14. Click on Start Backup option.

Conclusion

Microsoft Office 365 has become very popular due to its simple to use applications and various other services. Due to its popularity it has also become a target for many different cybercrimes and other malicious activities. This leads to data loss and may also lead to thr organisation taking a major hit to its productivity. It can also have losses due to this. In this article, we tell you the best Office 365 backup practices. This way you can keep track of your sensitive data to ensure its safety.