Arcserve Unified Data Protection for Office 365 Available in South Africa Market

According to Byron Horn-Botha, lead channel and partnership, Arcserve Southern Africa, there is complacency and incorrect assumptions in the market with regards to the backup and recovery capabilities of MS 365: “Users appear not to understand that they, and not Microsoft, are responsible for the protection and backup of their data from human error, internal and external threats, and programmatic issues.“

Microsoft does provide backup as part of a shared-responsibility model whereby they take responsibility for the physical security of their data centres and software failures on their part.

Horn-Botha says the assumption is that Office 365 items are backed up by Microsoft for long-term retention.”The reality is a different matter. The customer is accountable for the rest of the backup picture.”

“MS Office uptake has soared in the time of the pandemic, with the company reporting in April a 15% increase in quarterly sales. The product facilitates the work from anywhere, at any time, model. Organisations are dependent on it for e-mail communication, team collaboration and document retention. These needs have been boosted further by the global Covid-19 pandemic,” says Horn-Botha.

However, he says that while Microsoft does an outstanding job at taking care of the infrastructure for these services, it’s a misconception to think it also takes care of backup: “What business execs need to ask themselves is – what are the risks – and arms themselves with the information necessary to gain control over their MS 365 data. One simple example is where a company finds that it needs access to files stored on both OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online from a project that took place years ago, only to discover someone accidentally deleted the folder. This is followed by a desperate search in the recycle bin, again with the grim discovery that the necessary files aren’t there either.“

Office 365 retains files for only 90 days in the recycle bin, he adds. “Moreover, the bin can be emptied at any time, making the data completely unrecoverable. Even when data is retrievable, point-in-time recovery is out of scope of Microsoft, leaving businesses with no other choice but to recover the latest version available in the recycle bin with all the modifications they may not want. Furthermore, retention policies vary for each application in the cloud platform, making the process of recovering deleted items even more cumbersome.“

He says the inevitable result is time and money lost searching for unrecoverable documents and reworking lost files: “Arcserve’s solution is to make Office 365 protection a reality with our UDP solution. Companies can benefit from the most complete set of data protection capabilities available for Office 365, including: Complete support for the critical Office 365 services – Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business Deduplication and compression with strong AES encryption. Our UDP solution offers flexible storage support and licensing options to fit business needs plus streamlined, unified management interfaces for an integrated DR and backup solution; point-in-time backup and granular recovery. Organisations can take control of Office 365 data with Arcserve and protect their priceless data,” concludes Horn-Botha.