One of the first services our clients move to the cloud is email. This is a no-brainer for most of our clients as both Microsoft and Google have robust and very reasonable email hosting packages. These companies have huge and geographically diverse datacenters that back our client data. Employees can have the luxury of 100GB mailbox sizes and can archive years worth of email. This type of protection is very good for disaster recovery but what about data continuity?

For example,  how does Microsoft deal with user deleted data? Well, if you are familiar with Outlook and Microsoft Exchange you have probably heard of deleted item recovery where you can recover deleted items that have been recently deleted, typically no longer than 14-30 days depending on your configuration. You cannot recover data that was deleted past that time. Some of our customers need to have piece of mind that all of their data is recoverable especially in the case of accidental deletion.

This is where backup of your cloud data can be useful. You can utilize another cloud service to back up your cloud data, keeping a copy of your data in separate data center can enhance your disaster preparedness posture. You can also back up your data to your own data center if you have a hybrid cloud setup - one of our partners - Veeam can back up Office 365 including email, SharePoint and One Drive for a very competitive price.

While not all of our clients require or desire the backup of their cloud data, some are required to for compliance or other business reasons. We can help you decide if you need backup and what offerings fit your requirements.