Typically, there’s only a 30-day retention period inbuilt into Office 365, and Microsoft SharePoint Online is only backed up every 12 hours, with just a 14-day retention period. It’s no use relying on the recycle bins, either – there are no true backups here, meaning that once data is gone, it’s gone.
Ultimately, it’s up to you, the user, to safeguard data. Many companies don’t realise that Microsoft is not responsible for the protection and retention of user’s data – and this can have serious consequences.
Just imagine if you lost access to all the information in your Office 365 environment. With so much data distributed amongst Office 365 programmes – whether that’s spreadsheets, Word documents, emails and even calendar details – backing everything up is vital.
Many Office 365 backup solutions are incredibly flexible, meaning that you can keep your email data for as long as you need, and tailor it to meet the compliance needs of your business. Ensuring the constant availability of data is also key to meeting the requirements of many compliance standards, including GDPR.
Many solutions offer tools to enable the quick search and recovery of items, whether that’s entire mailboxes, folders, messages or tasks, in both existing or archived mailboxes, making it far easier to access data whenever this is required.
Most solutions have different options for how often backups are carried out, and many are carried out automatically, so that you won’t even have to think about it.
What’s more, you can often restore information directly to the form that you require, whether that’s an Office 365 mailbox, an on-premises Exchange mailbox, a PST file, or an email attachment, making it easy to access data wherever and whenever you need it.