#1 Microsoft 365 Backup and Recovery

It’s a common misconception to think that Microsoft backs up your Microsoft 365 (Office 365) data. In reality, while Microsoft provides great resiliency and built-in tools for compliance, they do not provide a comprehensive backup. Microsoft’s Shared Responsibility Model states that organizations are still responsible for their own data. For more information on how the Shared Responsibility Model works, you can read this blog.

To back up Office 365 data, it is recommended that you use a third-party backup provider or service. An Office 365 backup vendor will generally be able to provide simple processes to create backups and provide enough scheduling flexibility to meet any RPOs or RTOs. Backup vendors are also able to provide fast and granular data recovery that comes with advanced search capabilities so administrators can quickly find items to meet their legal and compliance needs.

To back up Microsoft Teams, it’s important to understand how Teams works on the back end. Teams is not a self-contained application, which means it acts as abstraction layer that brings data together from other applications, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. It’s important to back up your data from these other sources, but it’s equally important to back up configurations as well (i.e., settings, members and team structure). For this purpose, you should leverage a third-party backup provider armed with the latest Microsoft APIs to ensure that you can back up not only the data from key sources but the metadata and configurations for comprehensive data protection and efficient recovery.

The storage choices are endless for where you could store your Microsoft 365 backup, however it is an important strategy to think through. Whatever your decision is, the backup vendor you choose should be able to support backing up to on-premises, to hyperscale clouds like AWS, Azure and IBM Cloud or to managed service providers. Few vendors support all these storage options, but Veeam Software does.

You should be able to backup Microsoft 365 data as often as your business requires. Determine your recovery point objective (the maximum amount of data which can be lost following recovery) as well as your recovery time objectives (the amount of time it takes to get systems back up and running). Once you determine your RTOs and RPOs you will be able to better align your strategies to a backup vendor which can deliver upon them. Not only can Veeam Sofware backup data every five minutes, but you can tier your backups to have different backup frequencies across different departments.

Retention for deleted Office 365 data can vary by the application. For instance, an Exchange Online mailbox keeps deleted items for 14 days by default, but this setting can be changed up to a max of 30 days. When using the SharePoint Online application within a browser, items deleted are retained in the Recycle Bin for 93 days from the time of deletion.

It’s worth noting that retention policies can take time to set up correctly and data loss can and does occur, due to human error during retention policy configuration. So, it’s vital to have a backup of Microsoft 365 data as an insurance policy. 

All of them! Every users in your organization generates data every day, and most, if not all of that Microsoft 365 data will have some value and your organization will suffer if it is lost. It would be a mistake to not protect all of your organization’s data. No matter how large your organization is, Veeam is built to protect Microsoft 365 data at scale.

To calculate the number of licenses you need for Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, count the number of users within your Microsoft 365 subscription. You do not need to count the same user more than once across multiple Microsoft 365 services (e.g., the same Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business user = one Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 user).

Here are additional details for each Microsoft 365 service:

• Exchange Online or Exchange On-Premises: A user mailbox can be a personal mailbox, an online archive mailbox or both; you only need one license for that user. Please note that shared and resource mailboxes do not need to be licensed and can be backed up FREE of charge.

• OneDrive for Business: OneDrive for Business user licenses are automatically aligned with their matching email accounts. This means you cannot use the same license to back up one user’s email and another user’s OneDrive for Business account. Please note that OneDrive (without “for Business”) is a separate storage service and is not supported by this solution.

• SharePoint Online or SharePoint On-Premises: Each SharePoint user inside your Microsoft 365 subscription (or on-premises deployment) that has been granted access to the SharePoint sites you are looking to protect needs to be licensed to back up and protect your organization’s SharePoint environment. If you have a hybrid SharePoint deployment (i.e., SharePoint On-Premises and SharePoint Online) and the same user has access to both, only one Veeam license is needed for that user. Please note that external SharePoint users do not need to be licensed. An external SharePoint user is someone from outside your Microsoft 365 subscription to whom you have given access to one or more sites, files or folders. External authenticated users are limited to basic collaboration tasks and external anonymous users can edit or view specific documents when given specific permissions. 

• Microsoft Teams: When protecting a team with Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, you must have a license for each user that is an active team member and who has a paid Teams license in Microsoft 365

Yes, Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 allows you to perform 50+ different restores including granular and bulk options, so that you can recover your Microsoft 365 data your business requirements. 

You can ensure that Microsoft 365 data is secure by making sure that you can leverage immutability, data encryption and MFA with your backup provider of choice. 

Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 protects your critical Office 365 applications, including Exchange online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Teams. It also allows you to backup Exchange on-premises and SharePoint on-premises.  

Yes, Veeam offers a 30-day FREE trial of Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, and even after the trial is over you are still able to protect 10 users for FREE. You can also try our Hands-On Lab, allowing you to try the product with a completely web-based experience without having to add any of your own resources.

Veeam is the most trusted name in backup and the leader in Microsoft 365 backup, protecting 16M+ users worldwide. Compared to other backup vendors, Veeam is known for providing ultimate backup flexibility, the broadest recovery options and provides complete infrastructure freedom. 

Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 is a standalone solution but works with many other Veeam products. These include Veeam Explorers allowing for fast search and recovery capabilities as well as Veeam ONE for advanced monitoring and reporting.

Yes, Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 is built to seamlessly protect across hybrid Exchange or SharePoint On-premises and Office 365.

Yes, Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 Community Edition is free up to 10 users, 10 teams and 1 TB of SharePoint data.