Whether you already use Microsoft Exchange Online, or still considering it, there is one thing you need to be prepared for – to backup office 365 emails. You might think that Microsoft protection is enough for your needs, but the fact is that in case of disaster on the client-side Microsoft takes no responsibility for the data you store. That also applies to all your emails which as the main communication channel in your company includes confidential information, documents and your business secrets. In this article, we will take a look at why you should backup office 365 emails, and how to do it with Xopero Software.
Microsoft protection of Exchange Online
But first, let’s talk about why Microsoft security measures aren’t sufficient to protect your data. As you might already know Microsoft operates within the Shared Responsibility Model. What does it mean is that Microsoft takes as little responsibility for your data as possible. As your data is stored and operated in Microsoft data centers, the company is responsible only for the failure on their side – when something happens to your data as a result of problems with the data centers.
This leaves almost all of the responsibility for your data on you. But what exactly are you responsible for? Well, protecting your data in case of human error, user-side software errors, malware, ransomware, and other types of hacker attacks. Microsoft obligates you to ensure data-level security (data access, integrity, security and more), keep multiple copies and long-term retention to meet legal compliance and industry regulations. After all, you are the data owner. That is why Microsoft itself recommends having a proper third-party backup software and backup Office 365 emails.
Why backup Office 365 emails?
Problems with recovery and retention of Exchange emails
The first thing you need to know is that Microsoft retention periods are very short in default – in Exchange Online the maximum retention time can be set to 31 days. But what if you need to keep the copies for a longer period of time, in order to fulfill the legal requirements or company policies? Well, you can do it with the use of Microsoft-provided tools – litigation hold or retention policies. But when you decide to do it that way, the second problem surfaces – recovery issues.
Despite the fact that you would keep the copies accessible for longer periods of time, recovering them with just native Microsoft tools can be very complicated and time-consuming. The far better solution for that is setting up a proper backup for Office 365 emails and Exchange Online solution. With that in place, you wouldn’t have any problems with complying with the legal, industry or internal requirements.
Malicious attacks – #1 reason to backup Office 365 emails
The big threat to your data is any source of a malicious attack – starting from spam, phishing attacks, credential stealers to ransomware attacks encrypting your data, and demanding a ransom for a decryptor. I hope you can imagine that without a proper Exchange backup of Office 365 emails, your entire correspondence together with confidential attachments may be lost forever unless you want to risk and pay a huge amount of money for getting them back with no decrypting guarantee.
Responsibility for the data is yours
As we mentioned before, the whole responsibility for protecting and backup Office 365 emails lays on your side. As Microsoft puts all of the effort to keep the service available at all time (and they can do that pretty good, with 99% uptime), they don’t really care about protecting your data from many threats, such as the most common reason of data deletion – human error. It doesn’t matter how the emails got deleted if you don’t have a proper Office 365 email backup in place, you can easily lose important items.
How to backup Office 365 emails and Exchange Online with Xopero
We said much about having a proper backup for your Exchange Online mailboxes. Now let’s take a look at how to set it up with Xopero ONE. I will not brag about how easy it is, I’ll just show it to you so you can see it for yourself.
Adding your Microsoft 365 organization(s)
The first step is to add your Microsoft 365 organization to Xopero ONE. You can add as many organizations as you wish, as long as your license allows you to protect additional organizations. To add it, simply click on the add organization button.
When you click that button, a new form will pop up, with the steps you need to follow to add your organization. One of the most important steps is authorizing Xopero ONE on the Microsoft site.
If you want to specify more detailed information about the organization you are adding, at the bottom of the form you can click advanced configuration, a new form will open, allowing you to set some additional options.
If everything went correctly, click the next button, at the bottom of the form.
Congratulations! You have successfully added your Office 365 organization to the Xopero ONE! See? It’s super-easy!
Easily set a plan or choose predefined to backup Office 365 emails
Now let’s see how you can easily protect your Exchange Online service. To do that you will need to set a backup plan.
If you want to simply start protecting your Exchange Online right away, we have prepared a few predefined backup plans for you to use. But if you prefer to customize the plan that fits your needs you obviously can do it
Within the backup plan you can set schedule, retention, versioning, rotation scheme, encryption and compression levels and much, much more.
If you want to know how to do it, check this article about how to set up Office 365 backup with Xopero One, where we go into more details about what can you do with our backup solution, to protect your data even more effectively.
For now, let’s stick to the simplest way to make sure you have your Exchange emails protected and backed up within seconds. And to do that just click the “Protect now” button. The program will display for you our predefined, commonly used, and most popular plans. Simply pick the one that you want to execute.
Once you choose what plan to go with, there are only a few more things you need to set up. You need to choose the storage you want your copies to be stored on. If you have those settings configured during the creation of the administrator account you don’t have to worry about them. When you click on the plan you want to go with, it will be automatically proposed so you can confirm, and then click on the “Start now” button. That’s all! You have successfully started your automatic Exchange Online backup.
As you can see, to backup Office 365 emails with Xopero ONE is super-easy, setting up lasts a couple of minutes and then you can sit and chill out knowing your confidential correspondence is backed up, secured and encrypted. You get daily notifications to make sure everything performs well.
Xopero ONE – easily backup Office 365 emails and Exchange Online
Now you can see how easy it was to set up Exchange Online backup with Xopero ONE. Our solution allows you to easily backup Microsoft 365 mails, contacts, calendars, and OneDrive data – the way you want them to be protected.
Check advanced Xopero features to backup Office 365 emails:
- Unlimited data retention – store your data as long as you need and set GFS or FIFO rotation scheme.
- Granular recovery – take advantage of the fast, point-in-time recovery of only the files you want to recover – any folder, any mailbox, or even particular emails.
- Central, user-friendly management #1 – simple, the most intuitive central management web console. Thanks to the most user-friendly interface setting up efficient backup and recovering data are the simplest ever.
- Backup on-premise or in the cloud – You can choose where to store your copies, on your local machine, on your NAS device, or in the cloud compatible to AWS S3. It’s your choice!
- Encrypted backup – your data is always encrypted, choose a preferred encryption algorithm and length of the encryption key to make sure nobody, except you, can decrypt your information.
and many more…