My wife and I recorded lots of videos of our child’s first year of life—all stored on our smartphones. Starting with her first belly roll and then her first words, right up to those first few wobbly steps, we thought we had kept the memories safe. It wasn’t until we decided to stitch 5–6 videos together to create a movie for her first birthday that we realized, somehow between backing them up to the computer or to the cloud, we had lost half of our precious recordings. I have no clue what went wrong. I was not that cloud-savvy or backup savvy back then, and now I know that by choosing “upload to the cloud” in my photo settings I can have my photos and videos whenever I need them.
This story helps me empathize with the story a coworker told me. He knew a sales manager who had lost critical emails due to backup failure in his company and had no way to retrieve a set of emails which contained finalized quotes. Unfortunately, the loss of these emails resulted in him losing the account. Stories like this can be as painful as my personal experiences and only reinforce the need to make sure your data is backed up and available whenever and wherever you need it.
Lessons from Satya
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella starts his book Hit Refresh with a lesson on empathy and how empathy towards unique customer problems has been important in reinventing Microsoft’s soul. He also says in his book that Microsoft does not intend to solve all those problems by themselves. Instead, Microsoft empowers partners to be the extended arms of their digital transformation mission. To Microsoft, Veeam is such a partner. Microsoft and Veeam have been partnering for years to give customers best-in-class data protection as they continue their digital transformation journey.
Veeam Backup and Microsoft
Veeam is the industry leader in backup and recovery software for virtual, physical, and multi-cloud infrastructures. Gartner has placed Veeam in their Magic Quadrant among the leaders for Data Center Backup and Recovery Solutions for four consecutive years. Veeam has been building backup and recovery software for Microsoft products since 2011, and Veeam now has backup solutions that are highly integrated into Microsoft Azure. In 2016, they introduced Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365, and it has become the number one backup and recovery product for Microsoft Office 365—including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Teams, and OneDrive for Business.
In the following section, I will explain why Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 is an important addition to your Microsoft 365 modern workplace infrastructure and how Connection can help you eliminate the risk of losing access and control over your business-critical data by backing it up in Microsoft Azure.
Related: TechSperience Episode 80: Digital Transformation: Veeam and Microsoft Partner to Address the Cloud
Why Do You Need Veeam Backup for Your Microsoft 365 Data?
According to a recent 451 Research report, 60% of sensitive cloud data is stored in Office documents, and 75% of that data is NOT backed up! Oh, I know what you’re thinking—the infrastructure level data protection policies of Microsoft Office 365 ensure that you have access and control over your data at any time. However, if you want to achieve greater control over your data, you must take a data level approach. This is exactly where Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 becomes significant.
Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 eliminates the risk of losing access to your Office 365 data. It ensures that you remain in complete control and that your data is always available and protected—including maintaining your backups in Microsoft Azure.
With Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365, you can:
- Protect your Office 365 data from accidental deletion, security threats, and retention policy issues
- Quickly restore individual Office 365 items
- Meet legal and compliance requirements with efficient eDiscovery of data backups
- Store backups on-premises or in cloud object storage, including Microsoft Azure Blog storage—with Veeam, you’re not locked into a specific storage target
How does this help you as your organization relies increasingly on digital communication? Today, with most of us working from our home offices, businesses now more than ever are relying on Microsoft Office 365 to maintain communications with their employees, partners, and customers by storing, sharing, and accessing data within Microsoft Teams, OneDrive for Business, as well as Exchange and SharePoint Online. Companies need to ensure this critical data is protected from permanent deletion or corruption. And with Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Azure, you can ensure your data is always protected and accessible.
So what does it all mean for your average employee who accidentally deletes an important email? Unlike that poor sales manager from earlier, you can recover critical lost emails if you have Veeam. The days of costly, time consuming recoveries are gone. With Veeam Backup, you can easily perform granular restores of mailboxes and emails, SharePoint sites, documents, libraries, and lists, as well as OneDrive for Business accounts, files, and folders—all in a few simple clicks.
How Does Azure Work with Veeam Office 365 Backup?
Having Veeam-powered backups of your Microsoft Office 365 data in Azure is ideal for organizations who have completely migrated to Microsoft Office 365 and no longer have an on-premises Exchange server, or struggle with where they should keep their Microsoft Office 365 backups. By maintaining your backups in Microsoft Azure, you can accelerate recovery flexibility, with over 25 different recovery options provided by Veeam. Reduce storage costs by leveraging cost-effective Azure Blob storage, paying only for what you consume. And ensure data availability by maintaining your backups for as long as you want.Connection can also help you manage your Microsoft environment using Connection Managed Services which can manage and monitor your backed-up data on Azure. We have certified Veeam Solution specialists who can work with you to answer questions and help you ensure your data is safely backed up.
Sreeraj Vasukuttan
Sreeraj Vasukuttan is a Technical Marketing Manager at Connection with a passion for technology and marketing. He enjoys writing about cloud, security, and end-user compute. In his free time, he loves watching films, cooking, and traveling with his family.
