Top Reasons For Backing Up Cloud-Based Office Suites

There is an undeniable ease of use when working with cloud-based office suites—especially market leader Microsoft 365. However, for some businesses, the benefit of cloud apps may be balanced by a very bad habit: failure to back up data that belongs to them.
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  • April 13, 2021 | Author: Todd Hyten
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There is an undeniable ease of use when working with cloud-based office suites—especially market leader Microsoft 365. However, for some businesses, the benefit of cloud apps may be balanced by a very bad habit: failure to back up data that belongs to them. 

Even Microsoft emphasizes that they provide the infrastructure for these apps—but the data belongs to the customer and is their responsibility. Backing up cloud-based office suite data is more than a “nice to have.” 

 

There are many reasons for backing up data in cloud-based apps, but here are just some of the top reasons: 

 

Outages: SaaS outages still happen. Just as recently as March 2021, Microsoft Teams and Azure experienced a four-hour outage. This doesn’t sound like much but consider the effect of delays multiplied by those millions of users. How much of that was because someone couldn’t access crucial information in a file, folder or attached to an email? 

 

Limited access to deletions: Files or folders thrown into recycle bins on these cloud apps are not permanently recoverable. Under some scenarios (like purging a recycle bin), the user may have a limited time to recover data. When that time is up, it’s gone for good.

 

Ransomware/Malware: What, you thought ransomware only attacked on-premises data? Nope—if a hacker can gain unauthorized access to your cloud account, all those files and folders of data can be at risk of encryption or theft or exposure (the latter becoming more common).

 

Human Error: Ever accidentally saved over the wrong version of a file? No? Then count yourself lucky. Data is lost all the time in saving errors or simply while failing to save the right version of a file.

 

Malicious human behavior: Let’s say an employee or recently fired employee holds a grudge against someone in the company. What if they go into the office suite and delete or change files? Without a clean backup version of those files and folders, you may never be able to recover important data. 

 

Compliance: For some, there may be regulatory requirements for storing data. In some instances, some countries may require local storage of key data for privacy protection.

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