Easy online back up when working from home

Working from home is creating many unforeseen challenges, particularly given the unknown length of the lockdown due to the pandemic. Maintaining the security of your data is as important as ever and can be even harder now that colleagues are working from different locations.

While Office 365 OneDrive and Teams allows you and your colleagues to upload and share data, this should not be considered a backup. They are often 'live' documents that can be edited and permanently deleted.

Your online copy does give you a degree of protection; versioning allows you to go back to previous document amendments and reinstate changes or deletions, while the recycle bin offers various grace periods before it's gone forever. 14 days for email, 30 days for Teams and 186 days for OneDrive, providing you don't manually empty the recycle bin.

What are your options?

Online backups of your on-premise server

Local Network Attached Storage (NAS) drives offer the highest level of performance and are great for providing fast data backup. However, if the NAS drive Or USB Drive is not being taken off-site each day then all your data is in the same place and equally vulnerable to a fire or theft for example. But if your office is closed, a colleague travelling to and from the premises to change a backup drive may be a logistical problem as well as ill-advised for health reasons.

Online backups are great for a near instant, secure, off-site backup that could be accessed from other locations. The backup software can be installed and run remotely, ensuring colleagues do not need to be present for its operation.

Usually we come to site and take a 'snapshot' of your server onto a USB drive, upload it to our secure servers and then use online backups to save any incremental changes. Due to closed offices, we can still run the backup software, but it'll take longer for the initial backup to complete. After that, it operates as normal.

Your Office 365 cloud data is not backed up!

It's easy to believe that once your data has been uploaded to Microsoft's cloud, either on Outlook email, Teams or OneDrive, it's safely protected for all time. But when a user has negligently or deliberately deleted data, then there is no recovery.

If a file is deleted and the recycle bin emptied by the document owner, everyone the file is shared with loses the document too. According to backup provider Skykick, 71% of data loss is due to user error.

Many businesses have a legal requirement to retain data too. By backing up your online files, you also protect yourself from wider issues, such as disputes where digital evidence is required.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Strident works with Skykick to provide an industry-leading backup solution for Office 365. Skykick frequently backs ups all email, Teams, Sharepoint and OneDrive data to a separate, secure UK Microsoft data centre.

As these are true backups, not just synchronised copies, all emails and files can be stored and restored for an indefinite period. And because it runs automatically in the background online, it requires no manual intervention or a computer to be left on.

Server online backup and Skykick installed remotely

Both Server online backup and Skykick can be installed remotely by Strident without the need to visit your premises. This enables you to enhance your data security now without having to wait.

Skykick costs just £2 per user per month for email only or £3.50 per user per month to back up the full Office suite including Microsoft Teams.

To find out more, call Chris on 01473 835 280 to make online backups part of a data security plan.