Microsoft Office 365 is the current leader in the extremely competitive SaaS business application market. Even ahead of Google’s G Suite, Microsoft Office 365 for business has over 200 million monthly active users.
However, Office 365 is not only popular among business users. The widespread deployment of Office 365 makes it an attractive target for cyber attackers, especially in the wake of COVID-19.
During times of chaos, malicious actors take advantage of people’s fears and uncertainties, knowing that they are distracted by social events and may become less careful about online security. As a result, the pandemic has led to a surge in cyberattacks, especially phishing and other social engineering threats that rely on a user’s action to deploy malware.
COVID-19 also exposed new security vulnerabilities, as millions of businesses had to quickly migrate to remote work environments without the proper security infrastructure in place. With employees latvia whatsapp data accessing sensitive company resources from outside the firewall (often through a VPN and many without using company devices), the attack surface became exponentially larger almost overnight.
As everything settles down and businesses look for the best way forward, one of the first places to start is by tightening Office 365 data security. Navigating the new business normal is challenging enough without even adding a data breach or ransomware attack to the mix.
As a leader in enterprise application services, Office 365 is great at taking care of your infrastructure, but protecting your data is your responsibility. Microsoft offers backup for Office 365 under a shared responsibility model, meaning they maintain platform uptime, but it is the user's responsibility to prevent data loss.
If you feel like your current data protection plan isn’t sufficient to combat today’s increasing levels of cyber threats, it’s a good time to reconsider your process. Consider the following four critical areas when creating a data protection strategy for Office 365 .
1. Invest in a long-term retention solution
Long-term data retention is critical in the event of a major system outage, but Office 365 isn't designed with that functionality in mind.
For example, Office 365 only saves items in the Recycle Bin for 90 days. If the Recycle Bin is emptied, the items cannot be recovered. Office 365 also does not support point-in-time recovery , which makes data restoration even more complicated. Without point-in-time recovery capabilities, your data will only be as current as the last backup.
Investing in a long-term data retention solution that offers granular recovery from any point in time and fast restore to Office 365 will give you peace of mind that your data won’t be lost forever if your system goes down.