Last fall at Ignite, Microsoft announced a new data storage and recovery solution, Microsoft 365 Backup. This new storage architecture lives inside of the 365 platform, providing you with the simplicity of managing your critical data from OneDrive, SharePoint and Exchange Online, all in one place. This integration allows Microsoft to accelerate large scale backup and recovery times from catastrophic events, by an order of magnitude.

Capabilities

Microsoft 365 Backup provides the ability to:

1. Backup all or select SharePoint sites, OneDrive accounts, and Exchange mailboxes in your tenant.
2. Restore OneDrive accounts, SharePoint sites, and mailbox items to a prior point in time for your entire tenant.
3. Search or filter content in your backups using key metadata such as site names, owners, subject, creation/modification dates, and event types restore point date ranges.

Benefits

In cases of a ransomware attack that encrypts a large amount of your data, or in the event of an internal accidental or malicious data deletion or overwrite, Microsoft 365 Backup enables you to get your organization back up and running quickly. This is true through both the Microsoft 365 admin center, and via any partner applications you may have that are built on the Microsoft 365 Backup Storage platform. According to Microsoft, preliminary testing revealed recovery speeds more than 20 times faster than traditional backup architecture. Your data is kept in its original format, encrypted, geographically distributed, and secured within Microsoft 365.  Additionally, the backups are protected from malicious overwrites because OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange use Append-Only storage, which means content can only be added, never modified or deleted (except, of course, once the backup period expires).

Availability

Microsoft 365 Backup began its public preview phase late last year and is now available as such worldwide. General availability with full features is expected to be made available starting in July of this year. Once deployed and available for use in your tenant, you’ll see it in the Microsoft 365 admin center page under Settings. Note that during the preview period, performance and speed of web interfaces, initial configuration, and restores might be slower than expected as Microsoft scales up their infrastructure to meet the needs of the new product.

Pricing

This new backup service is a pay-as-you-go consumption-based service. The preview level list price is $0.15 per GB, per month of protected content, for 365 days from when the content is added to storage. The size of the content is based on the following:

• Cumulative back up size of all mailboxes, SharePoint sites, and OneDrive accounts being protected. Size of OneDrive accounts and SharePoint sites are the size of the live OneDrive accounts and SharePoint sites as displayed in the live sites’ usage reports. Mailboxes are the size of the user’s mailbox plus their online archives, plus deleted items held for Backup.
• Deleted content in a user’s Recycle Bin and second-stage Recycle Bin (also known as Site Collection Recycle Bin).

Learn More

Microsoft 365 Backup can provide your organization with business continuity in the event of an attack or accidental loss of data, ensuring a fast restore process. Additionally, you can trust that your stored data is also protected from harm. Please reach out to CGNET today if you’d like more information or have questions!