Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery.
Is your business-critical data safe from cyber-attacks? How fast can your business recover if a malicious actor deletes most of your data?
M365 built-in data protection
M365 has many protection features to protect data against accidental or malicious actions. Some protections are enabled by default, whereas others require careful thought and configuration. Examples include SharePoint document versioning, restoration of an entire library, recycle bins and retention policies.
However, all these features are not designed to recover from a disaster like ransomware, large-scale data corruption or deletion.
Plenty of backup solutions are available today.
M365 backup
Microsoft's backup solution promises ultra-fast backup and restore times and has consumption-based billing of 0.15 per GB. For example, to protect SharePoint sites with a total storage of 1TB, the cost is USD$150 per month. The price can be reduced by backing up carefully selected sites only.
Third-party backup
AvePoint and Veeam are a couple of other popular backup options. Both offer a per-user license pricing model with unlimited storage. For example, the Veeam Flex Plan includes backups for SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange, and Teams, and is USD$2.63 per-user. For 50 users, Veeam costs will be USD$131.5 per month. The pricing changes as the number of user accounts increases.
Our recommendation
First and foremost, ensure you are utilising all built-in protection features correctly. The next step is to conduct a risk assessment and decide whether your business requires a backup solution. If risk assessment indicates catastrophic business failure in the event of critical data loss, then backup makes sense.
We can work with you to identify the best data resiliency controls depending on your M365 subscription and help choose the best backup solution should you decide to use it.