The state of Office 365 backup

Protecting the explosion of Office 365 data

There’s an explosion of Microsoft Office 365 data and a pressing need to protect it.

Office 365 is seeing tremendous growth, particularly with the current world of remote workforces. According to Thexyz blog, in March 2020, the number of Teams meeting minutes increased 380% in just the first 19 days of the pandemic, climbing from 560 million to 2.7 billion per day.

The average gain in monthly Office 365 users nearly quadrupled from October 2019 to April 2020, in large part due to the increased reliance on collaborative work during the pandemic.

IT leaders understand their organizations’ reliance on Office 365 and the need to protect it. However, there is often confusion about which protection features are and aren’t included in Office 365’s native functionality.

In fact, Microsoft recommends customers use third-party backup, as the company only guarantees the availability of its service, not the retention of your data. As Microsoft does include some native retention, customers might not realize the limitations until there is a problem.

Customers may also find that Microsoft’s built-in tools are basic, and restoration with native tools can be difficult and time consuming. Organizations looking to protect fastgrowing data express concerns about the completeness of backup and retention solutions, as well as security, compliance, and, most importantly, how easy that solution is to deploy and use.

This report takes a look at the concerns and preferences IT professionals have about Office 365, data security, backup and recovery, software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, and related topics.

Methodology

Barracuda commissioned independent market researcher Centropy to conduct a survey of IT decision makers responsible for their organization’s cloud infrastructure. Participants included 1,828 IT decision makers in companies with 50 or more employees in the U.S., EMEA, and APAC. The survey was conducted in January 2021.