Backup And Recovery

The Best Way to Back Up Office 365: Expert Recommendations

Explore Office 365 and discover what additional backup and recovery can do for your organization’s business continuity.

Backup And Recovery Advice

Backing up your data should be a regular step in your cyber hygiene routine, one that pays off in the long run by saving time, frustration, and avoiding addition cost because of data loss.

A data backup is a copy or archive of important information on your computer or mobile devices that can be used to restore your information after data loss. Hard drive failures, theft, or ransomware attacks can result in you losing important files on your devices. Data backups can be stored in physical hard drives or on cloud backups.

If you’ve ever felt the frustration of losing an important piece of work that you had spent hours on, you have probably felt the anguish and panic, and questioned why you hadn’t backed the data up before. Backing up the data stored on your computer’s hard drive or your mobile device is a necessary task that helps to ensure you never lose a file.

While you may not think you’re at risk of data loss from a cyber threat, losing or damaging your device accidentally can destroy years of important data, so its always better to be prepared.

Why Should You Back Up Office 365 / Microsoft 365? 

Office 365 is used by more than a million companies worldwide and in 2024 held almost 46% of the global market share for office suite technologies. That’s a lot of company data that could potentially be lost.

Regular backups provide an additional layer of protection by allowing you to recover emails, files, and other critical data that might otherwise be permanently lost. While Microsoft provides robust infrastructure and redundancy for its services, it operates on a shared responsibility model, which means that data protection beyond certain points is the responsibility of the customers. Things like accidental deletion, ransomware attacks, insider threats, and retention policy gaps can all lead to data loss. This is particularly concerning when we consider that compliance with legal or regulatory requirements often necessitates retaining and restoring data for extended periods.

By implementing a dedicated backup solution, you can ensure business continuity, protect against cyber threats, and maintain control over your organization’s critical information. Organizations should do this to:

  • Prevent data loss in case important information is accidentally deleted 
  • Restore files in the event that data is lost either maliciously or accidentally 
  • Comply with compliance regulations and insurance expectations 

Shared Responsibility Model 

The shared responsibility model is a cloud security framework that defines the security obligations and operational responsibilities of cloud service providers and their customers. In this model, end users are responsible for securing their own endpoints, devices, accounts, identities, and data, while the provider is responsible for securing the underlying infrastructure, such as hardware, networking, and physical data centers.

The type of cloud service model – Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), or Software as a Service (SaaS) – dictates who is responsible for which security tasks. According to the Cloud Standards Customer Council (which is an advocacy group for cloud users) users’ responsibilities generally increase as they move from SaaS to PaaS to IaaS. In services like Microsoft 365, the provider ensures platform uptime and availability, but customers must handle data backups, compliance, and security settings.

This model emphasizes the need for customers to take an active role in safeguarding their own data and applications in the cloud.

What Backup Options Does Microsoft Offer Natively?

Microsoft 365 Backup works to ensure that your organization’s data is always easily recoverable and fully protected. They offer several native backup options within their services, though these are focused primarily on retention and recovery, rather than on comprehensive long-term backups.

Microsoft 365 Backup is a pay-as-you-go service that integrates with Microsoft Azure, allowing businesses to store and manage backups of critical data, such as emails, SharePoint sites, OneDrive files, and Teams conversations, directly in Azure. The pay-as-you-go model ensures that organizations only pay for the storage and resources they use, making it a flexible option for businesses of all sizes.

Snapshots are only taken every 12 hours and are stored for up to 14 days. Restoring these backups can only be done through contacting Microsoft support; the 365 portal doesn’t provide any options to do this yourself. After this point, it’s the customer’s responsibility to back up any data that they wish to keep longer term.

Benefits Of Using A Third-Party Tool For Backup 

Using a third-party backup tool for your data provides several key benefits, helping to enhance data protection and recovery capabilities beyond what is offered natively.

Some specific benefits of using a third-party tool for backup include:

  • More granular control over what data is backed up and how often backups run
  • The ability to restore backups on demand
  • Some solutions allow for rolling back to a previous state from a specific date / time

These third-party tools are also vendor-neutral, which means backups can be stored in diverse locations, including on-premises, cloud, or hybrid setups, giving businesses greater control and resilience. Ultimately, third-party backup tools help by providing robust, customizable solutions that go beyond the limitations of native options. This works to maintain data security, ensure compliance, and provides peace of mind.

Third-Party Options 

Contrary to popular belief, backup and archiving describe different concepts and shouldn’t be used interchangeably. Archiving is for discovery and backup is for recovery. Deployment options include cloud, on-premises, or hybrid.


The best solution for your organization will depend on your unique use case, but there are lots of good options available on the market. Here are some resources from Expert Insights to help you to understand and explore your options: