Microsoft Office 365 opens up a whole new world of collaboration and document sharing for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). However, it doesn’t, of itself, provide sufficient backup to protect your critical data. 58% of SMB’s across the US aren’t prepared for data loss—an alarming statistic, given that 60% of SMB’s who lose data shut down within 6 months.
Below, we break down why backing up data is so important and why Microsoft Office 365 isn’t sufficient for your data protection needs.
What is backup?
When you back up data, you make a copy of the data or the data files. This can be a physical copy, such as copying files to a USB drive, or a virtual copy, such as a cloud-based program.
Backing up your data means, if original data is damaged, lost, or breached in any way, you still have access to the original files.
Why you should back up your data
In business, you should always prepare for the unexpected. You need to minimize downtime and protect your business activity. That’s where backup comes in.
A data backup strategy is critical to any SMB’s disaster recovery plan. Without backing up data, you risk:
Loss of productivity and falling behind on timelines
Whenever you lose files or data, employees can’t get their work done. This may mean wasted time for you and your employees. It could also mean disappointing customers who are relying on you to complete a job.
Profit losses
if you’re spending more time rebuilding, repairing, or locating lost files, you’re not moving your business forward. Backing up data keeps your business moving in the right direction.
Damage to your brand and reputation
This is especially worrying if you lose files because of a data or security breach. When customers lose faith in you, it’s difficult to earn this trust back—especially as an SMB. Show you take both your customers and your business seriously by backing up your data.
Costly downtime and wasted resources
Smaller businesses struggle to recover from prolonged downtime, which all too often leads to wasted resources. Backup systems prevent or mitigate this lost time.
Don’t waste time redoing work and hunting down files for an audit. Get a proper backup strategy now.
Why Office 365 is insufficient for your backup needs
While many of us assume that Microsoft Office 365 protects and backs up our data, this is not strictly true.
There’s a big difference between the responsibility we have for properly backing up and securing our data and the responsibility held by Microsoft. Although the data protection policies for Microsoft Office 365 are more thorough than earlier policies, Microsoft doesn’t guarantee quick data retrieval—or complete data recovery.
By relying entirely on Office 365, there’s a real risk you won’t recover all of your data and that you’ll still experience lengthy downtime.
Cloud-based computing is safe, but that doesn’t mean it’s infallible.
Why you need a specific Office 365 backup solution
When you’re using Office 365, you’re likely sending, amending, and creating documents all the time. You need a comprehensive, reliable, and efficient way to back up all this changing data before it’s put at risk on the cloud.
What’s more, if one file in your Office 365 suite is compromised through, for example, a security breach or human error, it may affect multiple files across your business.
Having a separate backup system, completely removed from Office 365, is the best way to select the files you want to replace and ensure you never lose more files than necessary.