Microsoft 365 Backup

Microsoft replicates data across multiple datacentres. If hardware fails, or an entire facility is lost, your mail and files remain available. That is genuine, valuable protection and it is far better than most organizations achieved on their own.

It protects against Microsoft's infrastructure failing. It does not protect against anything originating inside your tenant, which is where essentially all real data loss comes from.

A file deleted by mistake is replicated as deleted. A mailbox emptied by a departing employee is replicated as empty. A retention policy that removed three years of content did exactly what it was configured to do, faithfully, everywhere. Replication is not a time machine; it is a copy of the current state.

Native recovery features exist and are useful. They are also time limited, and the limits are shorter than the situations that require them.

The pattern is consistent. Nobody discovers a missing folder the same afternoon. They discover it when a client asks about a job from two years ago, or when a dispute requires correspondence nobody has looked at since.

Ordinary human error

Somebody deletes the wrong folder, or empties a mailbox while tidying up. The most common cause by a wide margin, and the most easily recovered if a backup exists.

Departing employees

Content removed deliberately or accidentally around a departure, frequently noticed weeks later when somebody needs it and the licence has already been reclaimed.

Ransomware reaching synchronised files

Encrypted local files synchronise upward. Version history helps if it is within the retention window and if the versions themselves were not exhausted by the encryption process.

Retention policy acting as configured

A policy applied to meet a compliance requirement removes content permanently. It is not a fault and there is nothing to appeal to; the content is gone because the organization asked for it to be.

A compromised administrator account

An attacker with administrative access can delete at scale and disable the native protections while doing so. An independent backup is the only thing outside their reach.

That last row is the one most often skipped. A backup nobody has restored from is a belief rather than a control, and the moment of discovery is invariably the worst possible one.

Any organization whose mail and documents matter to its operation, which is effectively all of them. The cost per user is small, the exposure is total, and the decision is usually deferred only because the risk is invisible until it is realised.

The honest exception is an organization holding genuinely nothing of lasting value in its tenant, which is rare enough to be worth testing rather than assuming. The useful question is what would happen if the last three years of correspondence disappeared tonight.

Ask what your current recovery window actually is →