How to Modernize Your Microsoft 365 Data Protection Strategy to Ensure Business Continuity

Safeguarding the sensitive information within your Microsoft 365 environment is more important than ever. From accidental deletion and ransomware attacks to costly compliance failures, the consequences of inadequate data protection can be severe. It's important to understand the Shared Responsibility Model. The Model explains that Microsoft secures and ensures the uptime of its infrastructure, while you're ultimately responsible for correctly configuring settings, protecting against accidental data loss, and ensuring compliance with relevant regulations. Microsoft 365 provides powerful services, but a comprehensive backup of your data is not included in a standard Microsoft 365 license. Having an effective data protection strategy and comprehensive data backups are your best defense against these invisible dangers.

In today's digital era, the necessity of modernizing data protection solutions cannot be overstated. The 2024 Data Protection Trends Report revealed that 75% of organizations get hit by cyberattacks, and most report getting hit more than once. With the relentless increase in cyberattacks, businesses must adopt advanced strategies to safeguard their digital assets across applications and infrastructures. Leveraging innovative technologies, such as artificial intelligence, is pivotal for scaling protections in tandem with business growth and creating a lifeline for the future of your business.

When evaluating new Microsoft 365 data protection solutions, several key considerations can maximize your investment and effectively safeguard what you value most.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) Capabilities

In today's unpredictable digital environment, establishing business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) capabilities is a must. The optimal backup solution should not only protect data, but also facilitate a quick and efficient recovery process in the event of a disruption or disaster. It is vital to most companies to be able to maintain operations without significant downtime to sustain business functions and minimize losses, and particularly important for apps like Microsoft 365 which have become the productivity center for so many organizations. According to the 2024 Data Protection Trends Report, only 32% of organizations believe they could recover workloads within a business week. These Microsoft 365 recovery challenges have gained the attention of Microsoft and its partners, and through innovation and collaboration efforts, new Microsoft APIs are being leveraged to deliver the fastest Microsoft 365 backup and recovery capabilities to address any disaster scenario.

Ease of Deployment and Management

An ideal backup vendor will not limit your deployment options but provide you options to choose from, whether you want to adopt a traditional software solution where you connect individual components and storage, or whether you want to leverage an as-a-service model with everything included, pre-configured and deployed for you. When deciding on a solution, it's important to make sure the user interface is intuitive, and backup and recovery operations are easily managed. Product simplicity not only boosts efficiency, but also ensures your data protection measures are resilient and error-free.

The ideal solution will allow high customization of your backup and recovery operations, such as setting recovery point objectives (RPO) as low as you need with flexible backup scheduling, customization of your backup retention for as long as required and leveraging simple recovery processes. This level of manageability is crucial for keeping your operations smooth and making sure your data protection strategy is effective, continuous, and resilient.

Data storage and infrastructure freedom flexibility

Your backup solution should support a variety of different storage options, whether on-premises, hyperscale or managed service providers. It should also be flexible enough to allow you to move from one storage to another without any penalties. A flexible data storage strategy allows you to move data to any storage you choose to keep up with business priorities or changes to budget. Cloud object storage notably can adapt to changing business conditions, such as scaling storage capacity during periods of growth or transitioning to new technologies.

Now, in today's landscape, cloud storage is not just a trend but the new standard in backup data management. The heightened level of flexibility and scalability offered by cloud storage make it an ideal choice for businesses looking to streamline their data management and enhance their backup capabilities.

Backup Immutability

A backup must do more than just to give organizations a way of recovering data that has been accidentally deleted or overwritten. Backups must also be able to protect against ransomware attacks. In the 2024 Ransomware Trends Report it was discovered that in 96% of attacks, threat actors attempted to target backup repositories.

This highlights the importance of ensuring backup data is immutable, so that it cannot be overwritten, deleted or encrypted by ransomware. Having an immutable primary backup coupled with an immutable backup greatly increases the chances of being able to successfully recover from a ransomware attack.

Adopting As-a-Service Models

With digital transformation in full swing, adopting As-a-Service models for data protection continues to be a major trend. In fact, in the 2024 Data Protection Trends Report, 88% of enterprises were either very likely or almost certain to use a Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) or Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) for at least some of their production servers.

As-a-service solutions offer a scalable, flexible, and cost-effective way to manage data protection without the need for substantial upfront investments in infrastructure. Embracing as-a-Service models, allows organizations to benefit from continuous updates, automated maintenance, and policy-driven simplicity. This approach ensures that your data protection measures are always up to date and aligned with the latest security best practices.

Modernize Your Data Protection With Veeam

Veeam recently announced the next generation of its backup service, Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 with the new capabilities offered by Microsoft 365 Backup Storage. Veeam Data Cloud, which is built on Microsoft Azure, provides backup-as-a-service (BaaS) for Microsoft 365, enabling data resilience and leveraging powerful data protection and security technology within a simple, seamless user experience.

As a launch partner for Microsoft 365 Backup Storage, Veeam is leveraging the latest Microsoft technology with Veeam Data Cloud for Microsoft 365 to deliver lightning-fast backup and recovery capabilities for large Microsoft 365 environments, ensuring organizations protect critical data against cyber-attacks and data loss scenarios, further enabling complete data resiliency. This solution further strengthens Veeam's position in protecting Microsoft 365 users, with over 21 million users already under Veeam's protection. Learn More Here.

About Author: Edward Watson is a Principal Product Marketing Manager at Veeam Software, responsible for Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365. Starting as a managed service provider, Edward has a successful track record of bringing data protection solutions to market on a global scale. He has a passion for communicating the value of protecting Microsoft 365 data and helping organizations succeed in all their backup needs.