Office 365 Pricing: What It Really Costs Businesses

Your tech firm just acquired a small software company that has been using email to send files and now you have to migrate them to your Office 365 platform.

The engineers worked out potential bugs, you’ve read the Top 8 Security Vulnerabilities in Office 365 Migrations, and you trained the new office staff on your cybersecurity protocols.

Can you plan for the costs Office 365 pricing does not mention?

• The temporal and financial investment of data migration
• Email domains, public folders, and data loss
• Security breaches requiring an architectural overhaul of existing systems

While it is a good idea to get all the data on a secure platform, there are hidden costs to Office 365 cloud migration, too. Let us break it down for you:

Office 365 Migration Costs

Office 365 pricing does not tell you what it will take to get all of your data onto their platform. Here are a few of the unknowns to consider.

Email domains

Mergers mean new email domains for some, which comes at a cost Office 365 pricing does not cover. Even if your new subsidiary uses Office 365, you’ll need to plan weeks ahead, especially if your organization plans to migrate over 500 accounts to your Office 365 platform.

Network configuration

Migrating to Office 365 may require your organization to alter the network configuration for compliance. If you anticipate managing your network configuration on a regular basis, your team can peruse the best options in Network Configuration Management (NCM), rated here by ITT Systems.

Office 365 also offers help articles on network planning and performance tuning for the platform, such as:

• Office 365 performance tuning using baselines and performance history
• Best practices for network planning and improving performance for Office 365

And for the truly detail-oriented, you can scan the network planning reference for Office 365.

Data Loss

The cost: $50,000 to $5 million in downtime losses due to lost productivity, unrecoverable assets, and lost consumer confidence

Surely Office 365 has a backup solution! Yes and no. Office 365 uses replication–a backup method with a mixed reception–to secure and insure your company’s mission critical data. There are a few common breaches:

• User error
• Key players leave
• Logical corruption and hardware error
• Cyber threats hold data ransom

User Error and Key Players’ Exit

The case of user error by a current (or soon-to-be-former) employee can lead to files lost forever. When a user deletes a file, the replicated file goes with it. Gulp. Goodbye quarterly financial summaries and growth goals. Office 365 pricing cannot account for data loss of that magnitude.

If an executive or team lead takes their leave, even on good terms, they may take something unintentional from you: access. Loss of critical data due to the exit of strategic members occurs more often than we’d like to think.

Logical Corruption and Hardware Error

Whether by human or machine, data loss packs a fiduciary blow for any organization. Office 365 pricing includes cybersecurity, but the single-layered security approach is not sufficient for most mid-sized and larger organizations or highly regulated industries.

Cyber Threats

The cost: The average breached U.S. business spends $1.3 million per year on cyber attack fallout

Even the heightened security of  the U.S. government is not immune to cyber threats, as it discovered when the Office of Personnel Management was hit with a cyberattack, discovered April 2015. In a Mission Impossible style hack, the OPM cybersecurity breach left 5.6 million government employee fingerprints leaked to who knows where.

Cyber attacks can infiltrate any organization, so it’s important to be prepared with a cybersecurity and data backup solution that won’t cost you one bitcoin.

Know what you are paying, and what you are getting in return. With Backupify you can protect your data against loss and cyberattacks, with the ease of content sharing and data access Office 365 provides.

Data Retention

When an employee leaves, most companies are required to maintain their files for a period of time. Understand the cost to keep unnecessary licenses and associated retention costs with Backupify’s data retention cost calculator.

If you’re considering migration to Office 365, your organization should have realistic expectations of migration costs not mentioned Office 365 pricing. Review the costs mentioned here with your team and plan accordingly.

Click here to learn about Backupify’s data storage and security solutions for Office 365 today!