Microsoft Inspire 2023: Introduction of Microsoft 365 Backup and 365 Archive

By Jeff Teper, Microsoft Tech Community, Microsoft Corp.

Every day, our customers add more than 2 billion documents and emails to Microsoft 365. But it’s often unstructured, and traditional methods of manually processing and managing content are no longer effective at scale.

Screenshot from Microsoft Inspire session
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Microsoft Syntex, announced last fall, uses AI to enrich your content with automatic processing and bring it to mission-critical workflows and apps across your organization. Recent Syntex innovations including OCR, Content Assembly, and plugins for Copilot can help you enhance the value of your content and better manage it at scale.

Microsoft Syntex OCR screenshot
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And as the volume of your content grows, it becomes more important to protect it throughout its lifecycle and ensure better availability while managing costs.

To help you with these challenges we’re introducing Microsoft 365 Backup and 365 Archive at recent Microsoft Inspire. You can learn more in our Inspire featured session available now.

Microsoft 365 Backup

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The rise in ransomware encryption attacks and security breaches means organizations are making cybersecurity a priority to safeguard themselves from losing data and sensitive information. Organizations need to have a system to help them meet regulatory requirements.

Microsoft 365 Backup provides recovery of your OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange data at unprecedented speeds for large volumes of data with a restore SLA – while keeping it all within the Microsoft 365 security boundary.

• Backup all or select SharePoint sites, OneDrive accounts, and Exchange mailboxes in your tenant.

• Restore files, sites, and mailbox items in your tenant in parallel to a prior point-in-time in a granular manner or at massive scale.

• Search or filter content in your backups using key metadata such as item or site names, owners, or event types within specific restore point date ranges.

You’ll be able to access 365 Backup directly in the Microsoft 365 admin center.

You can also get the benefits of this technology by adopting a partner’s application built on top of our Backup APIs. You may choose to do this if you have a preferred partner or if you have non-Microsoft 365 data you also want to back up. Our partners can provide unique and powerful experiences within a single pane of glass for your Microsoft 365 and non-Microsoft 365 data sources. By leveraging the Backup APIs, partner apps can deliver the same unprecedented backup and restore speeds backed by Microsoft assurances – all while keeping that Microsoft 365 data within the trusted Microsoft security and compliance domain.

Get peace of mind that your content is securely and efficiently backed up and restorable in hours rather than months. Microsoft 365 Backup will be available in public preview in 4Q23.

Microsoft 365 Archive

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We’re seeing many organizations’ content growing at an exponential rate. This intensity is driven from collaboration, but also from customers importing masses of transactional data to take advantage of Microsoft’s advanced content AI services and integrated security, compliance, search, and collaboration.

Some content becomes inactive and less valuable for collaboration, but remains essential for business records and compliance. You may see your extra storage costs increase once you’ve fully consumed your included Microsoft 365 storage as content grows. We know you need a more cost-effective solution to securely and compliantly store long-term data within Microsoft 365.

“We were close to hitting our hot storage capacity limit, so we were looking for a sustainable, easy, and cost-effective way to archive terabytes of data for longer term retention. With Microsoft 365 Archive, we’re excited about the speed and ease of archiving in one place, the automatic geo residency adherence, and the integration of compliance features like eDiscovery. We’re glad to get time back since we don’t need to spend days archiving our content outside of Microsoft 365,” said Nathalie Schiltz, IT service owner for SharePoint, Nokia.

Microsoft 365 Archive
Today we’re excited to announce 365 Archive, which gives you a cold storage tier that enables you to keep inactive or aging data within SharePoint at a cost-effective price point matching the value of that data’s lifecycle stage.

Because the content is archived in place, it retains Microsoft 365’s valuable security, compliance, search, and rich metadata. With 365 Archive, you can:

• Select and archive or reactivate full sites in place without needing to migrate your data outside of Microsoft. File level archiving will be coming in 2H024.

• Maintain full admin-level search, eDiscovery, access policy, sensitivity label, DLP (Data Loss Prevention), retention policy, access control settings, and other security and compliance functionality.

• Gain additional de-cluttering experiences and site lifecycle control capabilities.

You’ll be able to easily archive and reactivate content in the SharePoint UI. You can also automate scaled mass archiving by running PowerShell scripts or setting policies in SharePoint Advanced Management’s site lifecycle manage feature. That feature has built-in workflows that asks site owners to confirm whether a site is active, inactive, or can be deleted before putting it into the archive state. The initial release of Microsoft 365 Archive will provide site-level archiving; file-level archiving will be available next year with powerful retention policy workflow integrations.

"Microsoft 365 Archive offers everything we need whilst keeping our data secure, within an existing trusted boundary, resilient across geographies and compliant with the standards and regulations that our projects must adhere to. With an eye to the future, the fact that files in Microsoft 365 Archive would remain searchable with selective restoration capabilities means we can facilitate connections to our archive in our normal flow of work. Our business will be able to achieve cost efficiencies through the archiving of over 750TB of existing content along with 200TB per year of new content," said Simon Denton, technical product manager, Mott MacDonald.

Microsoft 365 Archive will be available in public preview in Q4 of this year.

Partner solutions
365 Backup helps you protect Microsoft 365. And you likely have data to protect that goes beyond ‘just’ Microsoft 365. Many of our partners offer data backup and protection solutions that include Microsoft 365 sources along with a diverse range of other data sources, third party applications, and more sophisticated data protection scenarios.

That’s why we’re extending our APIs so partners can integrate our capabilities into their data management and protection apps. With 365 Backup and Microsoft 365 Archive APIs, our partners can uniquely provide a single and seamless experience that protects your data estate, whether inside or outside of Microsoft 365, in combination with our speed and storage innovations.

If you’re a customer who is invested in our partners’ solutions, you’ll be able to count on our commitment to partners as they use our APIs to deliver unprecedented Microsoft 365 backup and recovery speeds with their data protection capabilities.

Meet some of our early partners who are working with us to extend the benefits of 365 Backup to customers. These partners include AvePoint, Barracuda, CommVault, Rubrik, Veeam, and Veritas.

“As a Syntex launch partner, we are excited to expand our offering with a sophisticated approach to protecting data and take advantage of the restore speed and scale the Microsoft 365 Backup API has to offer., said John Peluso, CPO, AvePoint.

“Microsoft 365 Backup offers us the flexibility to provide fast backup and restore along with Microsoft 365 security and compliance benefits,” said Tim Jefferson, SVP, engineering for data, networks and application security, Barracuda.

“As a long-standing Microsoft partner, we are excited about integrating these APIs into our data protection solutions, extending these new, highly-performant Microsoft 365 capabilities to thousands of Metallic customers,” said David Ngo, CTO, Commvault.

“As a Microsoft partner, we’re excited to announce this new integration that leverages Microsoft APIs to enable our joint customers to rapidly restore data in bulk; maximize recoverability across Microsoft 365 Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams; and centralize data protection of all of their data in Rubrik Security Cloud,” said Anneka Gupta, CPO, Rubrik, Inc.

“Today Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 protects over 15 million Microsoft 365 users and we’re excited to integrate with Microsoft 365 Backup to help customers protect their critical business information no matter what happens,” said Danny Allan, CTO, Veeam Software, Inc.

“Microsoft and Veritas help our customers secure all their data estates from cyber threats, across enterprise data centers, cloud and SaaS. Veritas partnering with M365 Backup is exciting for our customers who will be able to enhance their cyber resilience to threats like Ransomware, with fast, granular recovery and long-term retention that meets data compliance needs,” said Lawrence Wong, CSO, Veritas.

Partnering with Microsoft
If you’re a partner, you can leverage our Backup and Archive APIs to build a holistic data protection and lifecycle management solution for your customer’s Microsoft 365 data along with their other data sources, all under a single pane of glass. You can provide differentiated intelligence, optimizations, and experiences while adding Microsoft’s restore, security, and compliance guarantees to your customer’s Microsoft 365 data.

As a partner, we encourage you to learn about our Content AI Partner Program (CAPP).  According to a new Forrester Consulting study, partners can generate up to $8/user/month on average when Microsoft Syntex is attached to a deal (Forrester Consulting, The Partner Opportunity for Microsoft Modern Work: A Total Economic Impact Partner Opportunity Analysis, July 2023. A commissioned study conduct by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Microsoft).

CAPP supports strategic partners delivering solutions that transform content management and focus on our advanced solutions, which include Microsoft Syntex, SharePoint, OneDrive, Purview and more – such as 365 Backup, and 365 Archive.

Through CAPP, partners can engage with the Microsoft product and sales teams, get early access to new training and collateral, attend monthly NDA meetings about upcoming features and initiatives, access sales support and incentives, and learn more about key content management scenarios.

Apply today to join the CAPP! We’re accepting new applications through August 27. (Existing members of CAPP will be contacted separately to renew.) We’ll notify applicants and start onboarding new partners by September 30.

Conclusion
365 Backup gives you speed and scale to backup and restore your mission-critical business, and 365 Archive provides a longer-term storage solution for your inactive and aging content. Together these solutions enable you to cost-effectively keep your data in Microsoft 365 with all the existing security, compliance, and search benefits Microsoft 365 has to offer, but with new lifecycle capabilities.

Both Microsoft 365 Backup and Microsoft 365 Archive will be in public preview later in 2023. You can apply for the Microsoft 365 Backup public preview, the Microsoft 365 Archive public preview, or both to be the 1st to experience these new capabilities.

Resources:
Microsoft Inspire featured session
Microsoft 365 Backup page
Microsoft 365 Archive page    
Sign up for our newsletter to get the latest details as new Microsoft 365 Backup, Microsoft 365 Archive, and other Microsoft Syntex services become available.
And for partners, sign up to learn more about working with our content management solutions in the Content AI Partner Program.    
More about Microsoft 365 at Inspire