As we move into deepest, darkest winter, pop another log on the fire, grab your cocoa with both hands, snuggle up, and get ready for a bone-chilling tale of ill-prepared users, and how you can avoid the pitfalls of not backing up your online data… 

Wind the clock back to a fictitious Christmas five years ago, and you’re just getting ready for shutdown, everyone has extra workload to make sure you can close your business over the holidays without loose ends flapping everywhere. It’s been snowing heavily, and the roof tiles give way slightly, letting a drip-drip-drip of near-freezing water seep into your on-premises server until…  

Well, you get the picture, but you learned from that and moved your emails, files, and working domain into the Cloud, using Microsoft’s excellent Office 365 platform. A few years on since ‘That Christmas’ you don’t have to worry about that leaky roof, dodgy servers, or users’ endpoints being critical points of failure. You’re relaxed. All-chill. Sit back and pop your feet up. Everything is in the Cloud. It’s all backed-up automatically, right? Nothing can go wrong.

Or so you thought…  

OK, enough with the theatrics 

Whilst we’re on the subject of stories, there’s a myth that if you have Office 365 data in the cloud, it’s backed up. Wrong - Microsoft don’t back-up your data as standard, so it’s vital to have a solution in place to protect yourself, your users, and your customers. It’s also easily assumed that your Office 365 data in the cloud is invulnerable and proof from equipment failure, and this is true to a degree; Microsoft for example do run a tight ship when it comes to making sure their cloud platforms have high-availability and geographical redundancy, meaning that the virtual machines that run all this wonderful cloud wizardry are ready to switch over to another physical host machine or data-centre elsewhere in the region, should a certain machine or server-hall develop a problem or get particularly swamped with operations, keeping your user experience fairly uninterrupted and consistently responsive. 

That, however, is not the entire spectrum of cyber-threats that you’re up against on the modern web. Data-thieves or ransomware attackers can still gain access to your Office 365 infrastructure through hacked user accounts (company directors or department heads needlessly having Admin rights with no additional checks is a classic security failure) and can possibly hold entire document libraries for ransom. Then there’s the good-old genuine mistake, where someone has deleted or changed a file, or moved something so it cannot easily be found, or permissions have been changed on cloud storage, with users are locked out of sites or libraries with no access to their data until a fix is identified and implemented. Let’s not even mention the damage that a disgruntled employee, or any other bad actor inside your organisation, can do in the space of minutes, let alone the hours, days, or weeks that they may still have access to your data during any notice period. It’s also worth looking at the wording on your cyber insurance, should you have a policy (most organisations should, and in some sectors it’s a legal requirement). Likelihood is, if you’re not backing up your cloud data, your policy is invalid.

We’re getting dramatic again… 

For good reason, as despite them running a high-availability, geographically redundant platform, there’s no secret-sauce that Microsoft pour on Office 365 that magically makes it significantly more secure than other cloud platforms, and as mentioned there’s no supplied backup solution. There are also still ways to get into Office 365 Cloud Tenancies uninvited, and organisations need to ensure that they are doing everything in their power to check that the doors are locked, and the drawbridge is up.

The X Factor 

Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA or sometimes referred to as 2FA) is now used everywhere, from websites to banking apps, and even some Electric Vehicles now have the option to require input from a mobile device before they can start. There’s no doubt that knowing something (password) and having something (your phone) mean that any individual looking to gain access to your cloud platform account surreptitiously now has the serious problem of not only needing to know your password, but also needing physical access to your mobile device. It’s fair to say that simply by turning on and enforcing MFA across your organisation, the size of the attack surface (The sum of the different points, or attack vectors, that an unauthorized user can try to enter or extract data from an environment) available to your everyday hacker becomes very small indeed. 

That takes care of one threat, but we’re still left with zero-day ransomware, genuine error, or malicious disruption. If only there was a way you could just save everyone’s email, OneDrive files, Teams activity, and SharePoint files and folders to a separate cloud backup, that would back up these data at several points throughout the day without any prompting or interference, allowing you to just reload individual items or entire user accounts’ worth of files back to earlier versions or their original places… well, there is. 

Enter Dropsuite 

Cloud backup services have been around for a while, with varying levels of value and functionality for the admin or end-user, but the solution that we recommend is a cloud backup service called Dropsuite. 

Dropsuite is a brilliant system that, once it has access, can back up and save Office 365 data with incremental backups running every couple of hours. Everything is easy to control from a central console, making the platform a breeze to deploy and manage for in-house IT admins and MSPs alike. We make Dropsuite available to clients from as little £3.75 per Office 365 user, per month, which is an absolute steal if you’re looking to bulletproof your Office 365 data for a reasonable cost. 

In addition to highly granular file storage backup and recovery for SharePoint and OneDrive, Dropsuite’s Email Archiving solution helps organizations efficiently store, safeguard, manage, and discover data from most email systems through Journaling. This means that shadow copies of all selected email activity are automatically created and moved to a storage area in real-time. Retention, eDiscovery, Legal Hold policies, and Compliance Review are just a few items that make Dropsuite’s Email Archiving a super-strong tool for your business’ communications archiving and compliance. With unlimited email archive storage and powerful search functions, finding relevant communications for historic and current projects or legal issues is a doddle. 

Packed with other features, it’s a must-have if you’re looking to deploy some serious data-security onto your Office 365 tenant, or if you manage multiple tenants and are looking for a cost-effective backup and storage security solution.  So, with Dropsuite there’s really no excuse not to implement this vital layer of security, and in doing so make sure that you and your users don’t star in some dark wintery tale of your own. 

If you need advice or guidance on the best way to protect your data in the cloud, then pick up the phone or drop us a mail today. We’ll be happy to hear from you, call us on 01452 222000.