Office 365 is getting a lot of well deserved attention, it’s an easy to use platform to provide your company with lots functionality without the need to heavily invest in on-premises infrastructure and hardware. Microsoft makes sure Office 365 is highly available and have all bits and pieces redundant. However, Microsoft does not own your data – You do! There are lots of different ways you might lose data: accidental deletion, ransomware and so on… A good read on the subject is a white paper from Veeam wich discusses 6 different areas:
- Accidental deletion
- Retention policy gaps and confusion
- Internal security threats
- External security threats
- Legal and compliance requirements
- Managing hybrid email deployments and migrations to Office 365
“With Office 365, it’s your data. You own it. You control it.”
-Microsoft
Since it’s your data it is also your responsibility to protect your data. Now, how would you go about doing that?
Veeam Backup for Office 365 is currently in version 1.5 and supports backing up the mail environment of Office 365. Release 2.0 has been announced and will be released sometime later this year (at VeeamON maybe?), with version 2.0 you will be able to also backup OneDrive and SharePoint. And if you buy Veeam Backup for Office 365 today (version 1.5) you will get the added features down the line with no additional fees or purchases, just upgrade the installation with the latest bits. Great stuff!
Another cool feature of Office 365 / Veeam Backup for Office 365 is that since both Office 365 and an on-premises Exchange server uses the same APIs you can use Veeam Backup for Office 365 to back up both environments if you have a hybrid installation, or you can even use Veeam as a migration tool – unidirectional of course!
But what does it take to start protecting your Office 365 mail environment? As it turns out, not a lot! It is REALLY simple to start backing up. As the video will show you, it took me no more than 3 minutes to start the first backup, quite impressive and again so simple to install.
See for yourself, the video shows installation of both Veeam Backup for Office 365 and Veeam Explorer for Exchange and configuring a new backup job in under 3 minutes: