Why companies should consider seamless recovery of Office365 and MS Teams file data as part of their CyberSecurity and DR Strategy

Data continues to grow inside of companies at an exponential rate, with the pandemic fuelling an acceleration of many companies digital transformation strategy.

What we have seen is that many companies have embraced Microsoft Teams and Office 365, often in short order due to business remote working needs.

Companies who are using Microsoft Office365 have employees using core 365 features inclusive of Sharepoint, OneDrive and Microsoft Teams with all data stored ‘in the cloud’ and often with no backup or archive strategy in place for disaster recovery (DR).

Teams in and of itself is an ‘interesting’ product in the sense that Teams is built on top of multiple Office 365 and Azure services and it can be difficult for a companies to get a handle on exactly where data is being stored.

The Enterprise Strategy Group did some research in which they found that 62% of companies used the ‘native resiliency capabilities’ of cloud services rather than implementing a separate strategy for Disaster Recovery and resiliency.

Firstly it’s important to establish the differences between ‘archive’,  backup’ and ‘snapshots’. ‘Snapshots’ offer for more frequent protection measured in minutes or hours, whereas ‘backups’ are typically setup to provide daily or weekly protection of data, and ‘archiving’ can be considered to be the process of moving data to another location for long-term retention.

Many companies that rely on cloud services for mission-critical applications assume that there’s no need to protect the data and apps that are stored there, relying on the cloud provider to protect their data, however the final responsibility for data always resides with the end customer who needs to take the required actions to protect their companies data from:

– Inadvertent user deletions, employee mistakes or rogue employees

– Securing data against a Ransomware, malware or other form of attack

– Business Continuity purposes

– Keeping a secondary copy of data to prevent vendor ‘lock-in’

Other than Sharepoint online Microsoft relies on the technology of the service to protect data so a third party service is required for a true office365 / MS Teams file backup or strategy for business continuity.

This is where the File Fabric comes in. One of the 60 connectors available for the File Fabric is the Office365 connector. The Office 365 connector can be used to connect an Office 365 account, however if you connect as an Administrator it is also able to be used to add a Microsoft Teams account.

Once added Office 365 data or MS Teams data can be accessed directly through the File Fabric as shown below, which shows the view of data within Microsoft Teams direct and the same view of Teams data once it is connected to the File Fabric:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Files can be added directly to the File Fabric Teams folder and it will appear directly in the Microsoft Teams interface. Data can also be moved, re-organised, renamed or deleted.

The File Fabric can also be configured to backup/archive data on demand using the products Forever File technology. A secondary cloud storage provider,  perhaps Azure Object Storage for example, can be nominated to be the secondary provider and once done the File Fabric will sync files on the primary (Teams) to the secondary (Azure in this example) and thereafter when files are modified or updated on the primary they will also be updated on the secondary.

 

 

 

 

 

This will ensure that there is always a backup /archive of the Office 365 / Microsoft Teams files that can easily be used as a failsafe copy and/or for business continuity purposes.

If there are multiple Teams setup then the File Fabric can be configured to connect to each.

If you would like to know more about the File Fabric and how it can add value to Office 365 and Microsoft teams please download our white paper.

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