What Your Cloud Vendor Doesn’t Tell You about Data Loss

If you lose data in Office 365, there is no defined process or rules for recovering it. You can call their support team, but the level of help they offer depends on the scenario. In general, Microsoft support doesn’t have the best reputation for getting people their data back. Their support team is tiered, so the responsiveness will also depend on how much you’re paying for a subscription.

G Suite customers can get online and phone support, but Google still tries to push as many of their customers as possible to the self-service Google Support Forums. Office 365 and Google are selling low-overhead, highly reliable cloud software. They go out of their way to ensure they will never lose your data. That means any data you lose was probably lost by you. And, as we mentioned above, neither Google nor Microsoft nor any other cloud vendor can protect you from yourself — which makes user error a great big cost center these vendors can’t control.

If Google had to put a support rep at your disposal every time you accidentally delete a Gmail message or Google Doc, G Suite would never make any money. The same is true for any cloud solution.

That tier-based support Microsoft offers is their way of ensuring that only people who really, really want and need to find lost data actually ask for help in recovering it. Google is subtler in trying to force their customers to solve their own data-loss problems, but it too wants to avoid undue responsibility when your data goes missing.

And, lest you think we’re misreading the purpose of these data recovery policies, Salesforce flat-out tells users to perform their own backups. Google recommends you use third-party G Suite backup tools in their own security policy. Cloud vendors want you to be responsible for correcting your own data loss errors. They are explicit about that stance. This is where cloud-to-cloud backup comes in. According to Forrester, leveraging a cloud-to-cloud backup solution is the only true guarantee your critical SaaS business data is protected.