Have you migrated to Office 365? Congratulations, but have you made sure that your data is properly protected and recoverable?
Remote work has intensified data protection challenges facing two-thirds of UK businesses, finds a new tech-focused survey.
Office 365 is seeing tremendous growth, particularly with the current world of remote workforces. According to Thexyz blog, in March 2020, the number of Teams meeting minutes increased 380% in just the first 19 days of the pandemic, climbing from 560 million to 2.7 billion per day.
The average gain in monthly Office 365 users nearly quadrupled from October 2019 to April 2020, in large part due to the increased reliance on collaborative work during the pandemic.
IT leaders understand their organizations’ reliance on Office 365 and the need to protect it. However, there is often confusion about which protection features are and aren’t included in Office 365’s native functionality.
In fact, Microsoft recommends customers use third-party backup, as the company only guarantees the availability of its service, not the retention of your data. As Microsoft does include some native retention, customers might not realize the limitations until there is a problem.
A new report released today titled ‘The State of Office 365 backup’, by Barracuda Networks, reveals that the worldwide shift to remote work during the pandemic has intensified the challenges associated with protecting Office 365 data.
45% of UK based organisations have already experienced a ransomware attack
The report findings revealed that nearly two-thirds (64%) of UK businesses are concerned about ransomware attacks facing its Microsoft Office 365 (O365) data. Furthermore, nearly half (45%) of UK based organisations have already experienced a ransomware attack, and 55% know an organisation that has experienced a ransomware attack and struggled with recovery.
To shed light on this issue, the report surveyed global IT decision makers in the UK to capture their opinions and perspectives about Office 365, data security, backup and recovery. The findings revealed that a comprehensive data backup solution with unlimited storage is an important priority for 84% of UK organisations this year.
It also revealed that granular restoration of Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams data is an important factor for three quarters (76%) of IT decision makers; the ability to download a copy of recovered items is important for 89% and, backing up a cloud application is important for 79%.
Furthermore, seven in 10 businesses (70%) are concerned about complying with data protection and privacy requirements, suggesting that regulatory concern is as much of a motivator for cloud backup solutions as security and accidental deletion. This is understandable when fines for violations can be as much as €20 million or a certain percentage of the previous year’s annual revenue, whichever is greater.
Tim Jefferson, SVP, Engineering for Data, Networks and Application Security, at Barracuda, said: “With the rapid shift to remote work dramatically increasing reliance on SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams over the past year, protecting Office 365 data is a more crucial requirement than ever before – and more challenging. That’s why organisations are looking for comprehensive, easy-to-use backup solutions that are fast to get up and running and include capabilities like granular retention that aren’t included in Microsoft’s native functionality.”
You can download ‘The State of Office 365 backup’ report from Barracuda Networks here.
