Backing up your data in M365: Hybrid solutions

As companies modernize and migrate their apps to the cloud, they are unknowingly setting up a complex environment that can be hard to manage. Since their data is now stored in the cloud, it – and their cloud-based backups - can be hacked. By retaining some of their on-premises data centers and locally-stored backups, IT leaders mitigate those security risks, thus creating the hybrid solution.

Hybrid solutions come with their own risks. As IT leaders optimize their networks and their end-user environments for efficiency, scale, and other cloud-enabled opportunities, they worry that they are not setting up the right structures to keep their data safe and their networks protected – especially when they have hybrid solutions.

If you have a hybrid solution, your on-premises data may be covered by a single-approach backup tool but your Microsoft 365 data will still only exist in the M365 platform. Third-party backup services can tie them together, making data not only recoverable but also searchable. Let’s break down how backing up your data in Microsoft 365 with BackupSimple from SoftwareOne can help.

The risks of a hybrid solution

First, let’s walk through a scenario. Kevin is a Data Protection Officer (DPO) at a large company based in Houston. The company has a global customer base for its products and uses a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool in addition to many other digital tools and platforms. As a result, customer data is stored in many different places.

The company recently made changes to the network infrastructure including a mass migration of the company’s internal apps to the cloud. This leaves even more customer data stored across a hybrid solution – both in the cloud for ease of access and on the company’s local data centers for security.

As a company that does business with citizens of the European Union, it must comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the sweeping data protection legislation covering the collection, storage, and usage of EU citizen data anywhere in the world.

After a security incident last week, it took the IT team at Kevin’s company almost a full workday to restore their backups and recover data after the breach. In some cases, the backups were not recent and data was lost. The very act of recovery was complex and time-consuming because there were multiple backups to recover and restore - including some that were app or platform-specific. Because each backup required a different protocol for deployment, the team had to be trained on how to use their unique recovery systems. As a result, the data recovery process was laborious and slow.

For Kevin as the DPO, that meant trouble. He knew that as a company with a global customer base, GDPR was a key consideration in this scenario. Despite the quick backup and recovery process offered by M365, there were still many data sets stored outside of M365 that were not recovered in time for GDPR compliance. It was a major hit not only to Kevin’s performance as a DPO but also to the company’s bottom line as they were subject to large fines because data recall after the incident was not instant per GDPR guidelines.

Streamlined backup for a quick, GDPR-compliant recovery

In a hybrid solution, the need for a backup service is even more important because some data is in the cloud and some is on-premises. These vastly different environments require a multifaceted approach to backup and recovery as well as to other critical business functions like compliance and security.

Managed backup services can help s fill in the gaps left open by platforms that do not offer options for full backup and recovery. That’s why BackupSimple covers all of it – data that is in the cloud as well as data that is stored and accessed on-premises. It allows for consistent data plans across all your data types, no matter where they are stored or where they are accessed from. Users can search files and administrators can quickly recover data from a single dashboard that spans all of your platforms. It also allows you to restore data from the cloud to your on-premises solutions and vice versa, allowing for the flexibility that today’s organizations need to stay agile and the speed they need to stay compliant.

Managed backup for instant data recall

Microsoft values efficiency and users’ needs and constantly strives to make things easier for their users, which is why Microsoft 365 adoption grows every year. One of the many things they have done recently is make SharePoint easier to use, with a hybrid solution for both cloud-based and on-premises data storage. Users can move freely between SharePoint on-premises and SharePoint Online and migration tools are easy to use. Critical data is stored according to internal security practices and in line with international compliance and governance standards without the typical end user having to understand how or why.