Why You Should Backup your Microsoft Teams

As demand soars so does the need for back up

At the start of the pandemic, the demand for Microsoft Teams grew. Working from home is set to be the new normal and it stands to reason then that there is an ever-increasing amount of vital data in Teams that needs protecting.

Why Backup Teams?

With over 75 million active users each day, 200 million meeting participants and a staggering 4.1 billion daily meeting minutes, there is an increasing amount of critical data in Teams that needs protecting.

Whilst Microsoft is heavily invested in mitigation against disasters, the assumption that because Teams is both accessed and stored in the cloud, that data is protected can be a costly mistake for business. Whilst inbuilt retention and versioning for Microsoft 365 offer some protection, this is not enough if data is lost or deleted.

From configuration errors, to ransomware and malicious behaviour there are many things that can threaten the security of a businesses cloud-based data and often these are ones that SaaS providers have little to no control over.

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Section 6B of Microsoft’s own Services Agreement recommends using a third-party to back up data.

Here are some of the reasons why:

Ransomware Attacks

Ransomware attacks are an ever present threat for businesses of all sizes, and with more of us working remotely the threat will continue to grow.

Regularly backing up of data will ensure that an uninfected copy is always available when you need it most. Meaning you can quickly recover mailboxes to retrieve an instance before the ransomware attack happened via streamed, on-demand, instant data access.

Company Leavers

A universal constant of business is that employees will leave. With staff attrition comes challenges surrounding data.

Once a user is deleted from Active Directory their data becomes outside of retention, along with this OneDrive data and Sharepoint sites are also deleted. Often this data is completely lost as businesses lack an efficient way to export it within the application, this is where a third-party backup solution really offers peace of mind, ensuring all critical data is transferred securely.

Corruption of Data

One of the things that makes Teams so popular is its ability to integrate with hundreds of third-party apps.

But how do you retrieve critical data in the event of one of these apps malfunctioning, corrupting data or deleting records? If you business utilises these add-ons then it is even more essential that precautions are in place to ensure your data can always be recovered.

Malicious Intent

It only takes one resentful employee to cause a real headache when data is involved. A user with the right credentials can easily delete incriminating files and emails and it is estimate that on average it takes more than 200 days for a business to realise their data has been compromised.

Microsoft default retention settings provide you with between 30 and 90 days in which to act, third-party data management solutions give you much longer to retrieve this data.

Standard Security Roles

One of the biggest challenges around recovering sensitive information is how much is the person able to see? Are you comfortable for your Microsoft Teams admins to have full access to all data held within Teams and have the ability to export SharePoint folders, Exchange mailboxes, OneDrive locations and Teams conversations?

This is where a backup provider can take the headache out of this, providing a secure centralised data management for security and auditing purposes.