If you are one of the many organizations embracing Microsoft Office 365, you may not realize there is a risk that your data could be lost. With Office 365, all your data, including emails, calendars, and files, live in a Microsoft cloud that is beyond your control. Does it matter? After all, Microsoft offers a financially backed guarantee of 99.9% uptime with state-of-the-art redundancy at every layer. But scratch beneath the surface and you’ll find good reasons to back up your Office 365 data to a central backup repository in your own secure data center or a trusted third party service provider’s data center.
Four Reasons Your Office 365 Data isn’t as Safe as You May Think
- Compliance. Many organizations fall under strict email and document retention regulations, where failure to comply can lead to expensive fines or worse. By default, deleted Office 365 data is non-recoverable after a maximum of 30 days. Longer retention times are only possible with more costly or expensive editions of Office 365. And if your Office 365 subscription is ever cancelled, all your data is automatically deleted after 90 days. Having your own backup copies of your Office 365 data ensures you can comply with regulations regardless of your Office 365 edition or whether or not your subscription is cancelled.
- Liability. The Office 365 terms of service currently limit Microsoft’s liability to $5,000 or your last 12 months subscription fees should anything happen to your data— assuming you can prove it was Microsoft’s fault. In contrast, the liability you might face if your Office 365 data were lost is potentially unlimited. Given the amount of risk you bear, it’s prudent to keep a copy of your Office 365 backup data in a secure, non-Microsoft location.
- Audit Rights. The Office 365 terms of service give you no audit rights. This is problematic if, as part of an audit, you are required to show the physical location where your data is stored. Maintaining a backup copy of your Office 365 data in a secure location that you are able to audit may be an acceptable way to work around this problem.
- Vendor Lock-in. Having all your Office 365 data in the Microsoft cloud effectively marries you to Microsoft, for better or for worse. If you want to keep your options open, then maintaining a backup copy of your Office 365 data makes it much easier to consider migrating to another vendor’s office productivity service.
Take Control of Your Office 365 Data Protection
Our solution powered by Asigra can help you securely protect your Office 365 data:
- Easily schedule automatic creation of point-in-time backup copies of your data in key Microsoft Office 365 services like Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive
- Backup copies are deduped, compressed, encrypted, and then stored to the secure private, public, or hybrid cloud of your choice (Figure 1)
- An intuitive user interface allows you to establish and automatically apply backup rules—no recovery settings need to be configured in Office 365
- The interface also helps you quickly recover your data—accidently deleted emails and files, corrupted calendars, or even entire mailboxes—either back into Microsoft Office 365 or to another location
- Define Office 365 backup rules with complete flexibility to meet the needs of your business, such as applying different point-in-time backup intervals and retention periods for OneDrive data versus Exchange data

- Easily accommodate different levels of protection for different groups of Office 365 users with custom backup sets (Figure 2)—for example, more frequent backups of Marketing’s Exchange data and less frequent backups of Development’s Exchange data

- Define protection rules for hundreds of users at the same time, to create backup domain schedules, and to view the status of the last backup, which is saves a lot of time in organizations with hundreds or thousands of Office 365 users
- Protect all editions of Office 365, without needing to purchase minimum edition levels or special add on features
Comprehensive Data Protection for Office 365 and the Entire Enterprise
Our solution protects much more than your Office 365 data, easily scaling to all other critical data sources in your organization, including physical or virtual machines, mobile endpoints, and other cloud sources like Salesforce, Google Apps or Amazon Web Services. With our solution, you can enjoy peace of mind knowing that your enterprise data
is protected and safe.
Business Benefits
- Granular backups of data in Office 365
- Recovery and restore assurance
- Standardized backup and recovery approaches
- Advanced administration options
- Peace of mind through automation – set it and forget it
- Deploy in the computing style of your choice: as a service to our data center; as a private cloud in your own data center; or a hybrid cloud. If your preferences evolve over time, you can change your deployment style easily
Key Features and Capabilities
- Secure Backup and Recovery for all Corporate Data Sources
- Agentless
- Autonomic Healing and Validation Restore
- Continuous Data Protection
- Selective Data Destruction
- NIST FIPS 140-2 Certified
- AES 256 Encryption at rest and in-flight
- Bandwidth Throttling
- WAN Optimized
Microsoft Office 365™ Services protected by our service
Microsoft Exchange Online™
- mailboxes
- email (including any attachments, meta data)
- calendars
- contacts
- tasks
Microsoft Sharepoint Online™
- sites
- calendars
- contacts
- discussion lists
- document libraries
- list content
Microsoft OneDrive™