Office365 Backup, Commodity, or not?

I’ll assume that you sit in one of two camps. Your organisation is already backing up Office 365 with a third-party product, or you’re not. Either way, you will have seen the press on what happens when you don’t. Are you considering it even if you don’t have an assigned budget or proper understanding from the business on why it’s important?

There’s another camp too. They’re living in ignorant bliss after moving their Exchange servers into the cloud (which they used to back up On-prem), relying on Microsoft to backup their data even when the Ts &Cs expressly state that you should do this with a third-party tool. But they’re a dying breed, and as Office 365 is the lifeblood of most organisations, it’s for good reason!

If you asked for a backup product 6 years ago when you moved over to Office 365, then you likely only had a couple of choices. They were expensive, and ransomware was still controllable by using border patrol rather than local policing. If you ask for it now, you have so many options that the decision is often being made on price and you may well have taken the simple, most straightforward route, having not had to do this before.

So, after a brief background, let’s get to the point. While there are a lot of choices, this is still a relatively new market. Some of the key players have a new software stack that is still under development or has purchased someone else’s product and/or OEM the solution and passed it off as their own. Right now, there are 6-7 recommended (by me!) solutions available, which can be purchased in around 15 different ways. Why am I telling you this?

Because too many customers are fixated on the price, on the understanding that all they want to do is back ‘it’ up.

I promise I am not going into sales mode and suggest you buy into a TCO model or diss the cheaper end of the market. Instead, I want you to ask a few more technical questions of your reseller and vendor and take into consideration the points below:

1.??????Vendor and Product line – It is either important to you or not that you have the same vendor for all your backups and data protection, but this is often about product integration and single pane of glass management. Nothing wrong with this but be sure that it is actually integrated. Just because it’s from the same vendor does not mean that it hasn’t been ‘bolted on’ and therefore is a different product, not an integrated product.

2.??????License terms – Per user, per month/year, per TB, fair usage (on storage) will make a massive difference to your cost profile. Put simply, I have just worked with someone on a 10,000 user account, who on a per user cost would have been quoted around ￡110k per year, their cost using a different method will reduce this bill to under ￡20k.

3.??????SaaS, Cloud, Appliances, software On-prem – Where is your data stored, do you need to run infrastructure onsite and patch it, is it on the same domain as the 365 tenancy? Microsoft will throttle you if you keep hitting it with backup traffic from your WAN ports. MSP’s calculate this so that they get full bandwidth that never hits your network.

4.??????Data protection – The solutions pretty much all do this differently, from the front end you have the frequency (from full journaled protection, running three times a day, once a day or on your own schedule on your own network) and on the backend can you force encryption, immutability and whether it is fully audited when someone accesses that data.

5.??????Functionality you’ve not thought about yet – here’s a little list (that is not the same for all vendors), so it is important to think about what you need.

a.??????Full SaaS model

b.??????Immutable storage

c.??????Self-service restore

d.??????Data obfuscation for backup admin (so your operators can see an email but not the content).

e.??????Full granularity between the user and/or product in what to protect

f.???????Unlimited storage amounts

g.??????2FA and/or single sign-on

h.??????Microsoft 365 Education Teams functionality

i.????????Restore options (PST, in place, zip files and versions) and granularity

j.????????Support

k.??????‘Free’ users (students in education)

l.????????Billing (consumption, per user, per year etc.)

m.????Advanced features – malware, phishing, threat intelligence, GDRP/Account Data process

In short, it's worth a discovery conversation first to find out what’s important to your organisation. Budget is always going to be a leading item, but with myriad options from the different vendors, many of whom may be tempting you for 3 years to make it more attractive on an ever-evolving product line, it warrants a little caution before you call the reseller.

I’m more than happy to talk through these elements with you, give you a demo and in most cases, we can offer you a one-month trial of the solution that most fits your needs.

Jon Moore

Jon Moore is a Technical Account Manager with ET Works, a technically driven reseller and MSP (all of the sales team have deployed the solutions we sell) who specialise in Enterprise Cloud and Next Generation Data Centre solutions.