Hey! Happy sunny day everyone. I hope your day is going well and enjoying the beautiful weather we’ve got going out there. At least I think it’s nice. I don’t know. I haven’t had a chance to look outside yet.

I wanted to talk a little bit about Office 365 backups. I know a lot of you that are using Office 365 may think, “Well, why do I need to back it up? Microsoft is doing that, right?” Well, not really. You want to look at your software agreement and know that they have language in there called “Best Case” or “Best Effort”.

By default, unless you’ve changed the policy, your retention time is only 14 days and that can be extended up to 30 days. Did you know that most breaches or attacks are not found until after 140 or 160 days? Can you retrieve your data? Probably not. There are several reasons why you want to back up that Office 365 data. You’ve got accidental deletions. How many times did we go, “Oops! No, I don’t want to do that. Stop”? Too late. It’s gone. You want to be able to get that data back.

You’ve got your internal threats. You’ve got Suzie who might bring in a laptop that got used at home by her son who was gaming online and is filled with things you have no idea and probably don’t want to know and that could attack your network and compromise your data and thus affect whether it’s email, files on SharePoint, OneDrive, if you’re starting to roll out Microsoft Teams and using that for some file storage and sharing as well.

You’ve got your external threats. We know those are happening every day. Somebody is hacking passwords and getting access to your Office 365 account and you’re not going to know it until days or months later unless you have some policies and alerts in place for that.

These reasons you want to make sure you’re backing up Office 365 in some manner by some vendor, whether you’re keeping that data for a month, three months, a year. If you’ve got legal or compliance issues, you may need to keep that data for three years or seven years or eleven years. Are you prepared to do that? If not, give us a call and we will help you through the process to make sure you’re legal, compliant. Maybe you can prevent the accidental, “Oops! I deleted my email.”

Kevin Baylor, Alliance IT. Have a great day.