Data Loss in Office 365

Regardless of the size or vertical of a company, data loss can be catastrophic. Everything from basic emails to end-user files, data loss has become an everyday normality for today’s organizations. When it comes to data loss for businesses, the most common causes are:

• Accidental deletion (human error)
• Virus or malware
• Hard disk or storage damage
• Software corruption
• Natural disaster

Microsoft has done a great job to try and mitigate these issues but is helpless when it comes to the most common cause of data loss in Office 365: human error. In a single slip of a keyboard, a safe and sound critical document can be wiped out forever.

In a survey by the Disaster Recovery Preparedness Council, 3 out of 4 surveyed companies had suffered major data loss, that included:

• Losing mission critical software applications
• Losing virtual machines
• Losing critical files
• Experiencing multiple days of downtime

Data loss has very real financial implications. In the same study, 20 percent of the companies surveyed have suffered $50,000 to $5 million in downtime losses due to lost productivity, unrecoverable assets, and lost consumer confidence. The study also found that more than half of companies that will suffer from catastrophic data loss as a result of a natural disaster often go out of business. They simply cannot recover the assets they lost, including customer data, onsite financial documents, application files, etc.

If you can’t bring your business back to normal operations in a little over a week, your chances of business survival plummet. Consumer confidence and employee morale and security are already stretched thin after a disaster, and if your business is not able to resume operations, your competitors will undoubtedly take your customers.

Office 365 as a service has the ability to restore anything within the core environment. In the wake of a catastrophic failure, Microsoft will ensure your data is restored and available through one of the many data centers that it runs specifically for this purpose. It does not necessarily take a catastrophic failure to warrant a restore of service and data. Simple deletion of content, both by end users and administrators, along with policy enforcement, means a restore is often needed.

To learn more, check out our eBook: Backupify For Office 365: Return Of The Data. With this eBook, get the facts straight on data backup and restore within Office 365 and go from data Youngling to data Master today. You’ll learn about the most common causes of data loss in O365, Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint, Yoda-like wisdom for total data protection in O365 and more!