Microsoft have announced two new Data Protection and Lifecycle Management features coming to Microsoft 365 – Microsoft 365 Backup and Microsoft 365 Archive.
Data is critical to the operations of every business, and we continue to generate more content every day – Microsoft report that over 2 billion files get added to Microsoft 365 every day. Offering a Microsoft 365 Backup service to your customers helps protect their data in the event of a serious security event and ensure they are able to gain access to their data as quickly so they can resume business operations. Ransomware is a serious concern for businesses globally, and New Zealand customers are becoming more aware of the risks as we see more and more high-profile ransomware attacks in the headlines. Microsoft’s Security Service Line, the team that supports customers with the investigation and recovery from cyberattacks, stated in the 2022 Microsoft Digital Defence Report, that limited data protection is one of the three main contributing factors to customers having weak protection against ransomware attacks. 44% of customers they supported did not have immutable backups for the impacted systems, and administrators did not have backups and recovery plans for critical assets.
The Microsoft 365 Backup product will enable customers to back up their OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange Online data, and restore the data in your tenant in parallel. This will help businesses to quickly backup and restore their data when necessary to support business continuity, reduce the impacts of a security breach or unplanned outage, and help meet security and compliance requirements.
The backup can be configured in Settings section of the Microsoft Admin Center, and you can choose to back up the entire tenant or create backup policies to just backup specific mailboxes, SharePoint, or OneDrive sites. When you kick off the backup, it backs up all the data in only a matter of minutes.
On the same page you can run data restore, you to do a point in time restore and restore your data from right before the security event took place or search and filter content in your backups using key metadata such as site names, owners, or event types. The restore only takes three steps – you choose the content type (SharePoint, OneDrive, or Exchange), choose the mailboxes or sites, and select the date and time to restore from, and then the data will restore in parallel in your Microsoft 365 tenant.
Initially for the first two weeks, the backup frequency will be 15-minutely for OneDrive and SharePoint, which will then shift to weekly for Sites and daily for files (if a file changes). For Exchange Online, changes will be captured with 10-secondly granularity meaning that any changes that happen faster than that will not be backed up.
Microsoft have additional features coming to Microsoft 365 Backup, that while not available initially are high priority on the roadmap to be added to the product, such as Teams chat backups and backup protections like multi-admin approval workflows for detrimental changes to backups, audit logs, notification emails to email lists, and grace periods to undo any destructive actions.
Microsoft 365 Archive
Customers are seeing substantial SharePoint usage growth, from both organic usage growth and due to data retention requirements for businesses to comply with their data protection obligations. We are seeing many customers fully consume their allocated SharePoint storage which results in additional admin overhead to manage an additional data storage service or and a significant increase in license costs to pay to additional SharePoint storage.
Microsoft 365 Archive will offer customers a cold data storage tier that enables them to keep inactive or aging data within SharePoint, so they can retain this data in a cost-effective manner.
SharePoint will also be able to provide archiving recommendations by identifying which sites are inactive, or you can create a policy to automatically archive SharePoint sites that have been inactive for a certain period, and that will kick off a workflow that will notify the site owner and give them a chance to mark their site as active, inactive, or deleted. You can also select what happens to the sites, either get archived or deleted, if the site owner does not respond after 4 notices.
In the future you'll be able to automatically archive individual files in place, instead of at the site level, using file-level retention policies.
